Fake photo story wins Grand Prix du Photoreportage Etudiant

Harry Lime

Harry Lime

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It's really a great commentary on what the world's media has become. I love a good poke in the eye of the establishment every now and then.
 
I'm not sure what it means other than that without integrity journalism of any kind is lost. Most of us can be easily fooled (weapons of mass destruction, remember?).
 
"Two French students were awarded the annual Grand Prix du Photoreportage Etudiant last week to honor a photographic story that presented images documenting the precarious lives of students today and the things they must do in order to survive and succeed."



Maybe I'm missing something here. But how does the dishonesty of a pair of students reflect badly upon the media? That's like blaming the U.S. Army for something a couple boy scouts did on a weekend camping trip.

If anything this demonstrates the perils of our increased reliance on "citizen journalists" to deliver news. They seldom have the same training (both in ethics and legal issues) that professional journalists have.
If you work as a photojournalist for a mainstream newspaper in this country and get caught doing anything remotely close to this - you would be fired on the spot.
 
"the dishonesty of a pair of students"

Excuse me standing up in front off all the people and unveiling the hoax and not taking the money can barely be called dishonesty!
Great Idea they had. I've read enough stories of PJ's trying to fake their way through it and being fired
 
I think this event speaks more to how photo contests are juried than it does to the agency of the press itself. Chase Jarvis' following statement was perhaps most germain:

"... they've surely made some brilliant statements about the nature of such imagery, called into question the cliched nature of the traditional canons recognizing that work, and made us all pause, even if just for a moment, to consider what photojournalism really is."
 
I know from a very few "live" example that journalism in far countries has little if any way of control. A journalist can tell you completely fictious stories, or report third party stories like if he/she actually witness the situation, and no one will know about it.
the "public opinion" is sadly enough, often completely based on these romantizations of the reality.
When you get a slightly more complex explanation about the "situation", and feel that you are about to be bored. When you don't get that "black and white" dramatic report style, then, you can start to believe that somethjng closer to reality is presented to you. Some very few medias seem to try to do their job despite the rest...
 
I think it's a funny stunt but it's about as revolutionary as Milli Vanilli.

The whole thing just goes to show how constructed the whole narrative behind a pj-story is. I can take a picture of a crying kid with dirt in the face and the description can either say "child crying after parents were killed in a bomb attack or "my neighbors daughter playing in the mud and crying after her brother pushed her".

The real question here is does it really matter? We know that people die in a war and we might also know that there are struggling students out there. Does it really make a difference if the pictures are fake?
 
Two very major American newspapers fired two of their prize winning photographers for “faking it.” One misused Photoshop; the other posed a subject.

Two of the wire services recently fired folk for faking it.

I’m sure there are plenty of firings I don’t know about.

Not to excuse it, but it’s a little harder to winnow out the fakes in a photo contest than it is working with established journalists. The judges were asked to pick out the most powerful, moving and dramatic images, not verify them. The magazine was at fault for failing to verify the winners, but it’s a little hard to do when someone you don’t have an established relationship with is lying to you.

That said, there are as many egocentric asses in journalism as any other profession. But since real news is about the subject, not the journalist, they are relatively easy to spot.

And, as to prizes, the big, consistent winners have usually been talented, hard working and willing to go after stories that were not only big, but difficult.
 
In the rush to be first with the news in this age of internet immediacy, many media sources have become lax in verification of facts. Apparently, the organization that presented this grand prize for photoreportage failed to verify the facts.

There's so many ways to deceive these days.
 
I doubt that any mainstream news publication in the 1970's would have published that picture including the severed head. It was a different era with different sensibilities. Larry Flynt first made a name for himself by moving beyond the carefully posed and airbrushed images of nude girls in the girlie magazines from other publishers. Suddenly young men discovered that girls also had hair "down there". Larry Flynt liked shock value. Had he been there he probably would have gotten the photographer to run a few rolls through the Nikon, trying this angle and that, looking for the best lighting, pose, and facial expression on the woman's face, and only stopping when they ran out of film or the flies got too annoying.
 
Yes..as we know "yellow journalism" is a thriving industry...photo or not. It does again strike at the core failing of journalism. Which is media coverage that is biased and has an AXE to grind. If journalist would stick to just presenting the "facts and nothing but the facts" in totality..journalism would not rank below "Used Cars Salesmen" for honesty. The concept of the ends is justified by what ever means...is the heart of darkness.
 
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