João Silva (photographer)

João Silva (born 9 August 1966 in Lisbon, Portugal) is a war photographer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the last working member of the Bang-Bang Club, a group of photographers who covered South Africa from the time of Nelson Mandela's release to the first elections in 1994. Silva has worked in Africa, the Balkans, Central Asia, Russia, and the Middle East. On 23 October 2010, Silva stepped on a landmine while on patrol with US soldiers in Kandahar, Afghanistan and lost his left leg below the knee, and his right leg above it.

João Silva was first employed as a photographer by the Alberton Record. While working for the paper, João managed to convince the editors to let him cover the violence in Thokoza. He soon started to submit photographs to Reuters before resigning from the paper in order to freelance full-time. Soon after he began to supply pictures to The Star as well as Reuters.

Silva accompanied Pulitzer Prize winner Kevin Carter to Sudan on the occasion when Carter took his photograph of a child and vulture. In an interview with Japanese journalist and writer Akio Fujiwara that was published in Fujiwara's book The Boy who Became a Postcard (絵葉書にされた少年 - Ehagaki ni sareta shōnen). According to Silva, Carter and Silva travelled to Sudan with the United Nations aboard Operation Lifeline Sudan and landed in Southern Sudan on 11 March 1993. The UN told them that they would take off again in 30 minutes (the time necessary to distribute food), so they ran around looking to take shots. The UN started to distribute corn and the women of the village came out of their wooden huts to meet the plane. Silva went looking for guerrilla fighters, while Carter strayed no more than a few dozen feet from the plane. Again according to Silva, Carter was quite shocked as it was the first time that he had seen a famine situation and so he took many shots of the children suffering from famine. Silva also started to take photos of children on the ground as if crying, which were not published. The parents of the children were busy taking food from the plane, so they had left their children only briefly while they collected the food. This was the situation for the boy in the photo taken by Carter. A vulture landed behind the boy. To get the two in focus, Carter approached the scene very slowly so as not to scare the vulture away and took a photo from approximately 10 metres. He took a few more photos before chasing the bird away.

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