I knew this photo from House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, in which the fictional photojournalist Will Navidson slowly goes mad in a house larger on the inside than the outside. Part of his suffering is he took this photograph but spent the time that would have saved her on setting up the shot for which he eventually became famous. "I miss the man I thought I was before I met her[,] the man who would have saved her," he writes. The real photographer, Kevin Carter, took it in Sudan for Life Magazine in 1993 and killed himself in 1994. His wrote in his suicide note, "I'm really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides joy to the point that joy does not exist."

I like this copy of the photo Despair because of the fold-line down the middle. Whoever clipped this from Life had to have folded it and carried it for some time before being able to deal with it.