She never claims to be a 1) Photojournalist or 2) Reporter.
She clearly articulates herself as an artist and appears to enter many fine art photography competitions, never attempting to pass her work as unmanipulated to her peers. Photo manipulation and composites is extremely common in fine art photography (as well as many other photography fields, ie. landscape), and the act is never questioned when the work is hanging in a gallery.
The narrative is part of the art. An artist does not have to put a disclaimer on their own website saying their work is not manipulated, they can also tell whatever STORY they want next to it. If anything how convincing her narrative and photos are speaks volumes to her ability as an artist.
Do not claim that collages or manipulations are not 'photographs' or that she didn't 'taken them'. She took every photo used, that act alone makes her a photographer. What constitutes a photograph can not be distilled to 'this photograph was manipulated so it is not a photograph'.
Take some of this anger and direct it at publications that stole her photos and published them as something they were not with no input from the artist. It is the medias job to research what they publish, it is not an artist's job to to dictate how someone interprets their art.
> She never claims to be a 1) Photojournalist or 2) Reporter.
She might never explicitly claim that, but the page is clearly written in photojournalist style. A photo of snow leopard tracks with coordinates, talking about and documenting the process of her search and how she finally managed to snap a photo of the leopard.
Reading that page I certainly would think the images are unaltered (i.e. not stitched together).
That is not to say that the publications that took the photos were in the right. But the false impression is not entirely on them.
Sorry but I call bullshit. Considering how these images were presented to the public and accepted by many, and later even sold, the level of editing and composite work this photographer does (if she even exists as the person she claims to be) is grossly dishonest even if she never said she was a photo journalist. Nobody who takes photography seriously as a profession or way of showing the world would call what she did photography in the way the images implicitly are presented as being true to in her own blog post.
There's enough doubt here to wonder if she even made the trip or took any photos of a leopard at all.
Also worth noting that her own website, registered in July of 2022, has posts backdated to April and March of 2021, which is strange to say the least.
I think it is fine to encourage peope to be more clear about the provence of their work. Calling someone "grossly dishonest" for not doing it in the way you want is not productive and, frankly, seems like bullying.
> if she even exists as the person she claims to be
Now you are simply being mean for no reason. There is evidence that she has been submitting work under thus name for several years and nowhere does she claim anything about this linking to any real world identity.
Take a moment yourself and try not to react emotionally to a series of completely valid arguments. Were this some other context, or possibly were it a man accused of this, would you be so understanding?
The french magazine itself suspected that the photographer may not exist as a real person by that name. Given the many inconsistencias and empty spots in numerous parts of their work biography and the present circus, it's far from being "just mean" to speculate the same.
>Which she doesn't. It is a side hobby, one which you have decided it is OK to bully her for because she isn't up to your professional standards.
Im not bullying anybody. This is casual discussion here on this site, not emails or messages sent directly to this photographer.
What's more, whether a person does photography as a hobby or professionally doesn't change the very definitely gross dishonesty of presenting their work as something it wasn't to multiple major organizations, selling it to numerous buyers under that strongly implied presentation and then only later very vaguely admitting to some editing and some composite work (without specifying that these shots were composites even though they very clearly were) only because she was called out for it in extremely specific detail by a professional magazine's analysis.
So yes, I repeat, perfectly calmly, that this was indeed gross dishonesty. If you were one of the people who saw her work presented on Saatchi Art for over $1500 per print (a damn good price for a photo by a recent unknown), and then paid for it because your reading of her original narrative very strongly encouraged you to think of the photos as real and very unique nature photography examples, I doubt you'd have so much "fucking empathy" either.
For those of us who take photography seriously enough to try being as honest as possible about its provenance and disclosing how our editing process works for the sake of sustaining respect among the public for photographers, things like this self-serving photographer's implicit bullshittery are simply annoying. AI is already letting people simulate images with increasing accuracy and pass them off as real. Someone very publicly being mendacious by more traditional means doesn't help that for others who still want to have their hard-won profession taken seriously still.
> take a moment yourself and try not to react emotionally to a series of completely valid arguments. Were this some other context, or possibly were it a man accused of this, would you be so understanding?
Yes.
> The french magazine itself suspected that the photographer may not exist as a real person by that name. Given the many inconsistencias and empty spots in numerous parts of their work biography and the present circus, it's far from being "just mean" to speculate the same.
I think the article author is engaging in the exact same clickbait online bullying. They emailed asking for higher resolution copies, but either didn't bother to ask her if the photos were manipulated or decided to not include her response.
> For those of us who take photography seriously enough to try being as honest as possible about its provenance and disclosing how our editing process works for the sake of sustaining respect among the public for photographers, things like this self-serving photographer's implicit bullshittery are simply annoying. AI is already letting people simulate images with increasing accuracy and pass them off as real. Someone very publicly being mendacious by more traditional means doesn't help that for others who still want to have their hard-won profession taken seriously still.
If you actually want to help improve the culture around provenance disclosure, bullying minor artists is not a good way to do that.
The french magazine article wasn't clickbait. It makes a claim and then strongly backs it up with detailed analysis. Did you even read the whole thing? They first asked for jpeg copies that they received along with metadata and EXIF details. Some of these made them wonder, along with other things, so they asked for two original RAW file copies. and plainly state that she then didn't reply at all.
>If you actually want to help improve the culture around provenance disclosure, bullying minor artists is not a good way to do that.
You're right. bullying minor artists isn't a good thing to do for fostering a good artistic culture in this broad space. However, calling out artists who tacitly or even plainly lie to multiple organizations and private buyers for monetary gain is a very different thing. Giving those a free pass because they're supposedly amateurs definitely doesn't help anyone or anything honest. I made my reasoning for it very clear previously.
> Also worth noting that her own website, registered in July of 2022, has posts backdated to April and March of 2021, which is strange to say the least.
So if you register a new domain name, you have to go back and edit your site's publication dates to be on or after the date in your whois record? lol?
Well, if your site was created on that date according to ICANN records, and you have multiple posts implying that it existed before that, it's one more little piece of a wider pattern of misdirection such as the stuff discussed above. So yeah, it does seem a bit odd.
> if your site was created on that date according to ICANN records
But that's not what the record indicates. You are confusing the concepts of a site and a domain name. A name points to a site. A site can exist before a name is registered.
It looks like her site used to be hosted at studiokittiya.com[1] which was registered in 2020.
> never attempting to pass her work as unmanipulated to her peers
Lying to non-photographers is also lying.
> An artist does not have to put a disclaimer on their own website saying their work is not manipulated, they can also tell whatever STORY they want next to it.
They presented it as real and were fine with it presented as real by others and selling photos as real until they were caught.
Is it not usually the case that, in photography competitions, there are separate categories for pictures showing situations and events that actually occurred in places that actually exist, and those produced by montage? The article alleges that examples of the latter were entered into competitions as the former. If this is so, then the very act would have been a falsehood, regardless of what she did not say elsewhere. This is so regardless of whether the competition rules permit certain post-processing of the image, unless the actual manipulations used fell within the rules.
One should not produce photographic art without being at least aware of its history as a representational medium, a context which still strongly surrounds the experience of viewing any photograph today.
The appeal to a "journalist" label (or lack thereof) is a shallow defense that does not stand up to any informed critique.
Artists who use the language of photographic representation to present fictional scenes would do themselves a huge favor by being transparent about it. Whether disclosed in advance or afterward (for example in satire), it's essential to being taken seriously as an artist, and not just an everyday boring faker. There is certainly nothing inherently artistic, interesting, or special about using software to manipulate the objects within the frame of a photo. Anyone can do it, just like anyone can take a snapshot with a camera.
And of course anyone can call themselves an artist and do whatever they want. But it's also true that anyone can critique their work. It's all fair game.
I'm very wary of any claims abut what artists "should" do.
There's good art, bad art, wise art, dumb art. Declaring that anyone who picks up a camera is implicitly agreeing to be bound by this kind of stricture.
Outsider art is a thing. Most of it is terrible, some of it breaks new ground. But I wouldn't say any of it is "doing art wrong" because they took the outsider approach.
Please read the rest of my comment. There's no "stricture," but if one engages in an artistic form without even the most basic awareness of its context, then one opens oneself up to a wide variety of criticism.
If anyone is trying to impose strictures, it is the comments above who try to declare criticism off-limits because there was not a "journalist" label or something.
Simply faking an animal portrait is not groundbreaking or "outsider." It's been done, and it's boring.
Who said "correct or incorrect" besides you? This conversation is about whether a photographer can be criticized for posting faked pictures (they can).
She clearly articulates herself as an artist and appears to enter many fine art photography competitions, never attempting to pass her work as unmanipulated to her peers. Photo manipulation and composites is extremely common in fine art photography (as well as many other photography fields, ie. landscape), and the act is never questioned when the work is hanging in a gallery.
The narrative is part of the art. An artist does not have to put a disclaimer on their own website saying their work is not manipulated, they can also tell whatever STORY they want next to it. If anything how convincing her narrative and photos are speaks volumes to her ability as an artist.
Do not claim that collages or manipulations are not 'photographs' or that she didn't 'taken them'. She took every photo used, that act alone makes her a photographer. What constitutes a photograph can not be distilled to 'this photograph was manipulated so it is not a photograph'.
Take some of this anger and direct it at publications that stole her photos and published them as something they were not with no input from the artist. It is the medias job to research what they publish, it is not an artist's job to to dictate how someone interprets their art.