> News and media from around the world stole my images and published them with their own meaning. They did not ask me if they were edited. They interpreted them in their own way and spread them around the world. They told their followers that they were not edited. This is untrue, I always edit my images.
> In September-October, I traveled to Nepal, took photos, edited them, and posted them on my Facebook Page to my 2000 friends and 1100 followers. The story behind this series is true, all of the images are taken by me. I did in fact walk 103 miles to take those images. I gave permission to a select few places to share them. My intent for the entire series was to raise awareness of snow leopard conservation. I sold a little over 50 prints and donated $787.50 to the Snow Leopard Trust.
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).
Your phone likely takes a collage of 3 photos, otherwise known as HDR, every time you tap the shutter and then does various AI thingies to make a selfie look pretty. And if you look closely, no that's not how things look to human eye. Wide angle group photo? A physically impossible illusion distorted to look passably normal. How much are you going to disclaim on Facebook?
In Argentina, if a publicity that has photoshoped human, then it must have a text explaining that. The idea was to fight against unrealistic body standards.
The actual result is that every publicity has that text, and people just ignore it.
The problem is that non-photoshopped photos do not represent reality either. Anything with different focal distance from human eye is by definition distorted. Levels of dark and light have to be squeezed into what computer/phone screen can show, often resulting in faces that would be fully black or white if corrective steps are not taken. Depth perception is lost, making people look much fatter than they are. A lot of edits are about approximating perceived reality rather than deception.
> The problem is that non-photoshopped photos do not represent reality either.
> A lot of edits are about approximating perceived reality rather than deception.
I agree with the first, but disagree with the second.
Anyway, another interesting thing is that many cell phones have a filter by default that removes skin imperfections, so now almost all photos by non professionals are "photoshoped" by default.
Border is not 100% clear but making collage out of multiple photo and pasting leopard that would never visit such location is definitely beyond what needs disclaiming
Copy and paste zoo photo on top of the mountain and claim you saw that in the wild? Sure, that would be a lie. But individual animals are also not unheard of to do unusual things and just how well are Snow Leopards researched to say they never ever come near glaciers? Maybe they do once in a while for their own reasons.
- this images are highly misleading, real snow leopards do NOT behave like that
- that makes me (and other) justifiably more suspicious about other claims related to snow leopards, nature protection and people involved
After all, if they are happy to lie in this way - maybe they are also happy to defraud money that got donated? Maybe snow leopards are extinct or impossible to protect anyway?
> Also if all this brings more awareness to safe these animals? win-win.
This also brings more awareness and proof that people lie to you and you should ignore their claims.
That is one of reasons for denialism of smog as real problem, denialism of global warming and so on.
Sacrificing trust and credibility to get less than 800$ (maybe they lied also about this?) is not a good trade.
Also that is a perfect case to show "see, they are probably lying again about this animals - lets build that motorway/factory/resort".
This is a bad strategy even if we do not care about ethics, lying and so on.
I don't see any lieing by the artist and certainly not to you. The images were shared with a total of 3000 people by the artist, I doubt you were one of them.
If anyone engaged in deception here, it is the publications and "journalists" that reused the images without permission and without doing any basic legwork.
Does she defend the claim, that she really saw a snow leopard in the mountains in the full article / website text?
Edit: Read the disclaimer myself. She seems to defent seeing a snow leopard, as she also has a picture of its paw up in the same collection. Make of that, as you will.
>Squinting through my camera’s telephoto lens, I noticed something in the shadow of Mount Pumori. At first I thought it was a rock, but it was exactly what I was looking for.
Worded vaguely enough for plausible deniability, like the rest of the text on that page. She never mentions seeing or photographing a snow leopard, nor does she mention editing the photos. This page seems carefully compiled in order to achieve exactly the attention she got, while at the same time allowing her to deny any lies if the truth got out.
Don’t forget that attention is the number one value for artists. Some who go for fame will do anything for it (whether justified or as a last ditch effort to make the artist dream reality)
So you've never had a better mixture of 60% H2O and 40% ethanol? Because that's what's left after 4x distillation followed by filtration, as claimed in the description.
I'm always baffled by people swooning over "good vodka". You're drinking industrial alcohol, diluted with distilled water! There's no flavor left.
You wish their distillation and filtration process is any good. I bet it could be repeated 20 times and it would still be garbage.
I had actual vodka made from aldehyde free HPLC grade dry alcohol and deionized water. (Remained after some cleaning of things.)
That thing literally has no taste and it's both smooth and burning sharp at the same time.
The other vodkas tend to have sugars and esters in the mix. You can detect them using a classic test.l, which shows how much the marketing about distillation process is worth.
They taste completely differently - depending on brand as well.
>I'm always baffled by people swooning over "good vodka". You're drinking industrial alcohol, diluted with distilled water! There's no flavor left.
Maybe you just have bad taste buds, i am baffled by people who don't taste the difference, an it's probably because you drink vodka that is made with distilled water.
No, the point is that the purest vodka is just ethanol and pure water, which you can approximate by distilling the water. I also don't understand why "good" vodka has any appeal at all, perhaps my bias.
I've always wondered how this escalates to death threats. I can vaguely understand it in the political sphere, there's a lot at stake with everyone believing the other side is pushing the city/state/nation/world towards certain destruction. But pictures of a snow leopard that may or may not be authentic?
How do people get from seeing a picture of a snow leopard to sending death threats? Are they just trolls who jump on to the case du jour to send threats to people? Is there a super hardcore competitive snow leopard photography scene where the stakes are high and the people are super invested?
> Are they just trolls who jump on to the case du jour to send threats to people?
Once someone has been positively categorized as belonging to the outgroup¹, people love to really get their kicks in. Doxx cheaters! Punch nazis! Get those groomers! Everything is acceptable towards the outgroup.
Some people have a strong sense of justice and love taking down people they see as cheating their way to success (this is often people who aren’t as successful as they thing they should be but aren’t accurately recognizing why). If you saw this going around social media, it might be easy to assume the creator made a serious amount of money or used it to get a good job. The more popular something was, the latter that group gets and thus the higher the risk of that group reaching a critical mass of disturbed people who escalate (often riling each other up).
Sadly, this also follows existing class, race, and gender status levels. If you’re an attractive white guy from an affluent background you are more likely to skate away from something like this without consequences. The further off you are from that, the more likely you are to encounter some sicko who thinks they’re putting you in your proper place.
Social media makes all of that worse because it provides instant gratification for everyone joining the pile-on and it allows them to feel like part of a large group even if they’re a small percentage of the total population.
>If you’re an attractive white guy from an affluent background you are more likely to skate away from something like this without consequences.
If you are a white guy you are less likely to skate away without consequences because it is possible to freely attack white men, while people are much more sympathetic to women.
Internet has plenty of people willing to make death threats with zero credibility or as jokes. The same goes for threats of sexual violence against family members.
See language used by gamers in competitive online games, especially team ones (CoD and LoL are example of games famous for toxic user base)
Longer answer: People (especially younger folks) tend to be insecure. That's why she did what she did, and why people are in such high dudgeon about it.
Myself, I don't really care. I like snow leopards, but haven't seen any (even at a zoo). I cannot imagine being famous (without the monetary rewards). That's one of the things about the Internet. It's possible to be famous; with all the downsides, and none of the upsides.
Because the DMCA explicitly does not shield you from criticism of your work.
The law was written exactly in such a way that you are allowed to use copyrighted materials in order to critique them.
Using the DMCA process to take down criticism is DMCA abuse.
My guess would be that fair use makes this an abuse?
They're using the images only as much as is required to debunk them being photos they're believed to be.
If you can't refer to something you're trying to discuss our debunk it makes it difficult to do so, does it not? I'd call their use here "evidence" or something along those lines.
If they were presenting the images as their own or for artistic viewing purposes, I could see her argument, but they're not, they're trying to start a conversation about how they're not what they appear or claim to be.
I think the grey area is that it is not clear that there was a reason to "debunk" anything. Other people, not the photographer (as far as the evidence shows), misrepresented the photographs.
If the photographer misrepresented them then yes it probably if fair use. However it's probably more grey than that, although may still be fair use. It's complicated.
However, if we take her statement at face value, I can completely see why someone who is now (potentially) the victim of an internet pile-on and death threats would want to use any means necessary to make that stop.
The photographer only added the disclaimers after the criticisms. So she definitely misrepresented them.
Also for the criticism fair use exception to copyright to apply, the criticism actually doesn’t have to be correct. Rather it just has to be criticism.
The DMCA also isn’t meant to be used to stop a pile on or protect people from criticism that is leading to death threats. It has a narrow use and all of this drama around it doesn’t affect whether or not this is fair use or not.
Also given that we know the photographer misrepresents things are we sure there are real death threats? Basically she is now the victim and blaming the accuser while also trying to silence the accuser. It is all so drama filled.
You're being down voted but not many have commented to discuss with you.
As another commented has said, the correctness of the pursuit doesn't really matter; it may be that the debunking actually finds here correct and "innocent", as I say; you can't discuss a subject without referring to it.
As for other people misrepresenting the photographs; I don't have a strong opinion about the whole thing; but, her statements, very clearly, in my opinion avoid or skirt around the truth; it very, very clearly omits detail.
There also some sugar coating of terminology; I'm not photographer, or artist, but I consider the statement "this is / is not edited" to mean something very different to "this is / is not a composite".
As someone who likes to provide detail, and not leave ambiguity when I describe my work, I find it quite jarring to read her descriptions; the wording is chosen carefully to avoid saying what is much easier to say, were it not done in a roundabout way.
"I found a pile of cash behind the living room wall" is much more to the point and clear than "I was redecorating my living room last week, and I found what I'd always been looking for".
There is never a situation that I think it's reasonable or fair for pile-ons death threats or any other kind of aggression to occur over something like this, it's unacceptable; however, regards misrepresenting her work, I firmly believe that position to be true given the evidence presented.
That said, this is just my opinion, and I make no comment on whether "misrepresenting" in itself is or is not an issue, just that I believe it _is_ misrepresented (intentionally).
Its not really grey at all actually. You are allowed to use copyrighted material in criticism (so long as its only what's needed for criticism, you cant just play a full movie as a loophole). How good or correct the criticism is, is totally irrelavent. This feels like an open and shut example where using the work would be ok.
If you think someone is lying, or ruining your reputation, that is what libel laws are for, not copyright.
I found it by accident by searching the photographers name. And then I saw there were results hidden via DMCA. And then I checked those and this is what was hidden. Check it yourself.
Packed snow shapes can be ambiguous, but entire mountain peaks don't randomly move to different places as is clearly the case in these photos.
The article presents and excellent and very detailed case for how the photos are doctored all over the place. It's obvious and easy to see once pointed out. I can't at all imagine how it's so hard to believe.
This combined with a bunch of other odd details makes her case very suspicious. Given how much her original narrative implied fairly pure nature photography and NOT artistic composite creations, what this photographer did was dishonest in a very straightforward sense. The dishonesty becomes all the more obvious when you realize that until she was called out by a detailed analysis, she freely let sites for such entities as Saatchi Art, the U.S Embassy in Nepal, Animal Planet and the Times of London, share, claim and think that her photos were essentially nature shots with modest editing and no more. Not a peep, and she even made sales.
It was only after this individual was called out by a very specific media analysis that suddenly "News and media from around the world stole my images and published them with their own meaning. They did not ask me if they were edited. They interpreted them in their own way and spread them around the world."
And then up go the DMCA claims against the same sites that had previously shared her photos approvingly withuot being asked to take them down then (especially petapixel)
She seemed to have no problem with any of that as long as her original blog post and all it strongly implied were believed.
If what she presented was a "narrative" for a specific audience, I think that's fine. Sort of like literary fiction vs non-fiction story writing. We have historical fiction where we mix past and present real and fake. I don't see why a conceptual artists can't do the same with their photography/art --unless they were completely deceiving their audience for manipulation or monetary gain, i.e. fraud.
On the other hand it seems people are using her images without permission and passing them as authentic—which if we’re talking about transgressions, would be worse.
> We have historical fiction where we mix past and present real and fake.
It is fine as long as it presented as historical fiction.
> unless they were completely deceiving their audience for manipulation or monetary gain, i.e. fraud.
They were at least deliberately deceiving their audience (though technically without stating demonstrably false statement - nevertheless they were lying)
That’s a possibility. However maybe her “real” audience is a small group to whom she presented these via other media and are or were looking for reaction to the art. In other words a public art installation. Is it real, is it fake? That’s the art.
The bigger problem to me is other people swiping her art, not confirming and not attributing it —simply using her art.
Interesting. If they passed them as real to the newspaper then yeah, that's problematic. What I don't know and can't tell from that is if that claim is part of the art. In other words I cannot verify that was actually published on the Times on Nov 10. Or if it was how much the times knew.
I dislike this style of journalism, they are creating a narrative that proposes a malicious intent to deceive by the photographer and artist, but provide zero evidence that that is the case. They bombard you with evidence of "something" and imply it means something else.
Here they are providing (compelling) evidence the photos are manipulated, but using that to imply that that manipulation was done to deceive. There is no evidence of that.
So she didn't explicitly say they were manipulated photos (initially), but she also didn't say they weren't.
The people at fault in this whole saga are the publications that published the photos without permission or checking their veracity and the author of this article who is suggesting malicious intent without evidence.
This article, while well researched and presented, just feels like gatekeeping by someone with a personal grudge.
As a society we really need to step back from the need to attack first.
So if I sell you a car that looks a mirror image of a wanted Ferrari for say half a million, but then you come home and you find out it was built on a Fiat chassis and a bit of crafty bodywork, you would be fine with it?
I mean I didn’t explicitly say it wasn’t a Ferrari, you inferred it was.
Pretty sure that doesn’t fly under most laws.
Publications are under extreme stress as is with few people to fact check, with only a few exceptions.
So at the very least both parties in the wrong here, and some of it is systemic of the way we do things.
I do agree we shouldn’t immediately “hate” or “attack” ofcourse.
I think the main question is between the customers that bought her art and her: as long as they knew they were buying collages, all good, otherwise there's a problem.
Agreed, is this at a competition or something? The article makes it sound like the photographer won a prize with doctored photos, but if it's just someone posting a composite and everyone going crazy with "omg that's not a photo", that's very very different.
Providing the originals would also make it trivial to pass it through https://fotoforensics.com/
to carry out a more robust detection of doctoring of the images.
I find the whole story misleading at best: having the 'composite' (fake) images next to captions explaining that this is a snow leopard at 17,014 ft (5185 meters) is dishonest.
She thought she could get away with it but backtracked a few days later after it got out of hands.
It does not contain that disclaimer. So, unless it was moved from another part of the website, there was no disclaimer before the article was published.
Images are highly misleading, no actual snow leopards are in places like this.
Also, even disclaimer is misleading and not making clear that many images are heavily faked. Not just colour balanced but altogether merge of multiple different photos.
That is just lying from side of that artist ("photographer" is misleading here).
I wonder if it is also because she didn’t receive any formal education in art (as per her website) , so she is highly oblivious to some ways things are done.
At the same time she tries to appear as if she is some celebrated artist (mentioned by National Geographic etc.)
She seems to be have chosen ambiguity as her mode of communication which is troublesome.
Note: That analysis (ELA) only really looks at gradient/diff of compression artefacts in pratice, so if you losslessly edited the original from the RAW source at full float32 (say in Nuke or something which supports full precision workflows) and then exported to another file, that wouldn't show anything.
In other words, it's mostly only good for detecting if a JPEG (with compression artefacts) was edited and saved to another JPEG, although even then you can work around it to some degree by saving at similar chroma and compression qualities if you know what you're doing.
The article was last Friday. Any idea when she added the disclaimer? It looks like she never meant it to be presented as anything other than a composite, but someone took it as such and ran with it. Now she's trying to weather the "you're a terrible person" shitstorm.
I think the point is she wasn't explicitly presenting them as authentic, in which case whether or not the disclaimer is there originally is irrelavent.
They were and still are presenting them as actual photos
>Squinting through my camera’s telephoto lens, I noticed something in the shadow of Mount Pumori. At first I thought it was a rock, but it was exactly what I was looking for.
Does she claim anywhere that she did? As far as I can tell she only claims that she took photos in Nepal that she later touched up to her hearts content.
Artists don't need to add disclaimers to their work. They are not journalists. That would be ridiculous.
The only relevant question you have to ask yourself is whether she (herself) presented herself as a journalist. If not then this is all a bit weird to accuse her of anything.
Obviously artists can use photo montages. And obviously artists don't even have to disclose that anywhere. The art can stand for itself.
Apologies if my comment read with the implication that she needed to? To clarify, I don't care in the slightest whether she adds a disclaimer or not.
After reading the article, which was pretty blunt, I was trying to figure out whether she had been forced to add a disclaimer of sorts (because had that been there initially, I would have assumed it would have been mentioned in the article). I guess her work went 'viral' and now people are accusing her of being dishonest in a way that (again, I assume!) she (most likely!) didn't set out to be.
At least that was my take. I could be completely wrong and she could have set out to manipulate the entire world - but I'd prefer to give her the benefit of the doubt. Hanlon's razor and all that :-)
fotoforensics.com is not robust in detecting fakes. This still requires human judgement.
Naively looking at what you see there and taking it for gospel very likely leads to both false positives and negatives. I think the assumption that you can just take any image, upload it to fotoforensics.com and know whether it's fake is dangerous.
I think her website has been changed now? It’s very explicit that “yes, all my photos are edited to some extend, and I never told anyone any different”.
Non-story? Photography is by default understood to be creative work, the very first thing people do is replace entire sky with computer generated imagery if it doesn't look interesting enough. There are certainly situations where authentic reproduction is important - law, journalism, documentary, medicine. And if she used someone else's photos without credit/permission, that's a problem. But that family portrait or pack of wolves shot over your mantelpiece? Edited! If you really want to look at your pimples or nearby hiker's behind every day, negotiate that with the photographer. But most people want art, not a police mugshot in these situations.
I am not saying there is nothing there, just that malice is not proven and someone has wasted a lot of time refuting what has not been explicitly claimed. I would buy a print if I like, the price was right and especially if money went to a good cause. If anything, I would want the close up one to be brightened/de-hazed for my living room, even though nature doesn't always look like that.
As someone who deals (in the VFX industry) in CG rendering/lighting and compositing/rotopainting footage on a daily basis, I'm really not convinced by these arguments at all.
Certainly the hair "lock" to me looks a lot more like a strap of a bag tied up or something than hair.
Also packed snow shapes can change quite significantly in days if there's wind and or significant snowfall: obviously the mountain rock topology won't change, but in most of the cases in the article the lettered points (to me at least) appear to be packed snow mounds more than snow on rocks (although the backdrop one looks more rock-based).
Edit: I would say however that I would agree "what is a snow leopard doing that high in the snowline?: there's unlikely to be prey there".
The point for me was that a snow leopard never walks on such exposes snowy terrain, actually no animal does (humans with ropes are a exeption), it's simply too dangerous:
>>As to whether snow leopards are likely to be seen on glaciers, Vincent Munier, a snow-leopard specialist, is categoric – the answer is no.
But from her site:
>I am simply a 24-year-old girl that has a 9-5 job, likes to take/edit photos, and tries to raise awareness of conservation and help our planet. Since I have received death threats for all of this, I have taken down my social accounts.
It was maybe just to have a cool photo...but that is unacceptable behavior from the "social" community.
Wow, I get it that people get angry when composite and staged photos win photography competitions. But going as far as sending death threats to a hobbyist photographer whose photos were published by third parties, without proper permission and proper disclaimers it seems, is truly despicable. Because there is nothing wrong with composites (I don't do them, but art is in the eye of the beholder) as long as they are not passed on as non-composites. And just where the line between post-processing, editing and composites is, well, those lines are blurry, aren't they?
Yes, it's the internet and there are lots of crazy people out there, but on the other hand "I've been threatened" is a quick and easy way for trying to erase/blur things you'd prefere not to be inspected any closer.
Maybe she was gambling. If nobody had noticed this fake, this could have been a HUGE thing and a start into another lucrative career, maybe get an award or two. After all there are these once in a lifetime shots and people take them and it's a big thing. And you might look up to those and hope for your personal shot of a lifetime and be tempted to help yourself a bit...
"serious" or not, death threats are hard to brush off.
Just because someone only engaged in one part of the internet bullying that is happening here and didn't send the threats themselves, doesn't excuse responsibility for them. Just helping foment the hostility makes you somewhat culpable for the inevitable death threats that come with that hostility.
To be clear anyone making death threats to her should stop that.
On the other hand someone posting here comments pointing out that they were lying is not responsible for idiots elsewhere posting death threats. And it is not bullying or "helping foment the hostility".
She doesn't seem to be trying to, it looks from her website that she's quite a successful digital art / composite creator and that's what she claims to be.
> The point for me was that a snow leopard never walks on such exposes snowy terrain, actually no animal does (humans with ropes are a exeption), it's simply too dangerous.
Many animals do. Chamois and tahr are two that I've observed doing so, and have been frequently documented doing so.
Sure, there's no prey on a snow covered alpine pass for a leopard.
And there's no grazing on a snow covered alpine pass for a chamois either.
But _there_ is food on the other side of that pass. Hence why it's worth the walk. And why do they use the pass? Same reason humans do, minimise energy expenditure by crossing at the lowest point.
I agree. I found this line to be particularly strange:
>> Detailed perusal reveals a ‘superfluous’ lock of hair that doesn’t match the rest of the young woman’s hairstyle. Undeniable proof the image has been manipulated.
Is it really undeniable proof? I feel like there are possible explanations for what we're seeing.
The artist has since admitted on the artist's own website that they are completely manipulated and that the error was on the part of the consumer in believing that they were anything except completely manipulated.
"To clarify, all my images are edited and processed in Photoshop and Lightroom. Some images are composites, some are not. Some are only lightly retouched. I am NOT a journalist. I never stated my images were not edited anywhere."
Then ever need photographer in the world is a cheater.m
Hell, Ansel Adams is a cheater by that definition - he made “color” photos by tinting black and whites by hand (in the 20s, before developing his signature style)
That reminds me of a series of prints at Ansel Adams' house implying that "Moonrise over Hernandez" was heavily doctored, with each version having elements like very different sized moons. Of course it was all an inside joke for his friends, with the joke being that crafting those sorts of collages was entirely outside of the realm of the types of edits he did when making prints from negatives.
Not every photographer removes existing mountain from photo or adds non-existing animals to picture.
One thing is slightly touch colors, other thing is completely messing with objects in photo, if you don't see difference between these two approaches it's difficult to discuss it.
Most photographers alter colors, lighting, remove signs, wires, lampposts or even people from their images. A lot of them crop, or alter perspective in post. As mentioned here, most documentaries are montages of completely separate footage to tell a story they want to tell. Is any of that cheating as well?
Some photography books aimed at beginners even suggest editing in more dynamic skies into photos.
It's a matter of style if not anything else. Some photographers will accept only what comes out of camera, others will take more liberties with their work. It's not like any fake claims are made here.
It's interesting to note that must nature documentaries are essentially composites too. It's a common practice to create scenes using footage from different times and locations, staged, with altered sound etc. All presented with a narrative that does not match what we're actually seeing on the screen.
Yeah, like when they tell a story of a lioness, for example, but, occasionally, you can tell the lioness in the shot is not the same one, or the shot was taken before the one that preceded it.
I don't know what to think. I don't have a stake in this, but it is quite common for documentaries to take some real liberties with the information they present.
>>Squinting through my camera’s telephoto lens, I noticed something in the shadow of Mount Pumori. At first I thought it was a rock, but it was exactly what I was looking for.
It's been probably 15 years since I took a class on image processing, but I recall that it was very obvious looking at a 2D FFT and other frequency analysis tools if an image had been modified, because you'd end up with a lot of discontinuities. Maybe that is not as telling these days because every image is going through multiple rounds of processing. However I personally find it difficult to follow the "look at the shadows!" type of analysis, and all I can think is there's probably a better way to present this with less ambiguity. Maybe the writer is just using the tools they know and doesn't have the background or tools they need.
Those technique don't work very well when the edits are done on the RAW files directly. I creates a lot of false positive and negatives. When a picture is shared by the original photographer directly, it's extremely hard to differentiate between fake and real.
Just to name a few reasons for it that come to mind:
-The original resolution is wayyy bigger than what you see online. When you go from 300Mpx (eg. a panorama) down to 2 - 10 mpx and add compression, it will hide most of the artefacts.
-better lenses means they have less distortion and sharpness problem at the edge of the frame. Makes it easier to blend different pictures together seamlessly
-raw files editing allows a lot more modification to the colors without degradation or leaving traces. You are effectively changing the choices that the camera makes when it creates the colors. There is no difference between changing the color temperature in the camera and in photoshop if you use RAW.
With jpg editing done by a third party... yeah, those are easy to spot with the right tools
Bright eyed 24yo dev: Hey look at this amazing thing I made. Only 100 dependencies. Donate money to my patreon. World: That's slick, good on you for putting yourself out there.
Bright eyed 24yo non-dev: Hey look at this amazing thing I made. Buy a print and think about conservation and I will donate money to a charity. World: Wow. Hang on, not wow! NOT. WOW! Our original wow was based on our own distorted / ignorant reality, now corrected by internet / Truth™. OMG you f#$!ing tried to trick us. At least we're pretty sure you did. Destroy.
Edit: She's 24. She doesn't need to be taught a lesson by you or the internet.
Agreed. I feel like everyone here just can't process the concept of fiction or having fun.
It's her website. It's her art. She can do what she wants. Maybe some people should take responsibility for being "fooled" by fiction themselves instead of trying to blame some random artist for deception.
For me the worst part of that is progressing destruction of trust.
People keep running into things like that all the time, for me previous case was being assigned a completely fake quote in some local news website (luckily, they had neither my name nor photo).
If someone is unsure why some people claim that global warming is fake, smog is not harmful and so on - that is because we have far too many lies and people willing to defend clear liars.
As result many people flail looking for trustworthy data source. And typically end with even worse, but for many distinction was not clear.
TBH nothing pushes me towards misanthropy more than the sad realization that virtually everything nowadays is either heavily exaggerated or just outright fake/lies. And it's not even the actual dishonesty that bugs me, it's the fact that we have been conditioned to accept this as okay.
Very, very little photography that you will ever see is untouched - from mild tweaking of curves to complete recomposition. This is what photoshop is for.
Ansel Adams, for example, used to dodge and burn extensively when printing, and is viewed as a master of the art - he was mostly really good at upping the drama by amplifying or outright inventing chiaroscuro.
Where does the line lie? Well, it depends on who your friends are.
You are comparing Ansel Adam's Dodge and Burn (which certainly alters the image quite a bit, no question) with pasting different mountain ranges and a snow leopard together, making essentially a digital composite? That's ridiculous! One is increasing and decreasing light and shadow in an image, only working with what was captured physically on that sheet of film. The other is copy and pasting from different photographs, making it seem like it was one photo. Totally different ball games in my eyes.
The whole editing stuff into photo montages is ok, if you don't claim otherwise. Which, according to the photographer, she never claimed. Quite the opposite, she seems to be pretty upfront about how she takes and edits pictures.
Until the disclaimer was added there was no way to tell these photos were fake. On the contrary, there was a whole story-telling about how she made this difficult trip and suddenly saw what she was looking for in a magical moment, which supports the idea that this was genuine animal photography.
It is therefore no surprise that people assumed these photos were real and now feel deceived.
Even now that she added this disclaimer, she is antyhing but clear as to what is actually real or not. Are we speaking of editing and composite as in "I took a great photo and just added a few rocks here and removed a cloud there to make it cooler" or in "I built this whole landscape and then added a snow leopard on top of it"?
She claims she genuinely photographied the snow leopard, but this is very unlikely and the deception already identified makes it difficult to believe her.
Edit: reading more carefully she claims she saw "what she was looking for" which you would obviously interpret as a snow leopard, but is vague enough to offer her yet again another opportunity to say she "never said that".
You're missing the point. Nobody here is criticizing the art itself; it looks great.
The whole point is deceiving people into believing those are real pictures when they are not. She received huge exposure in major newspapers, specialist magazines, social media, even the American embassy because of this (and sold many prints). She enjoyed that attention, even reblogged the article from the Times of London, without ever correcting anybody about the actual nature of her work.
Had she been forthright about the fact that the pictures were fake, she never would have received such attention. The picture still look cool in their own right, but we would be far from the incredible achievement that such picture would represent if they were real.
As Munier said: "I’ve got nothing against this type of creation, but it has to be presented as such".
I don't think it's her job to tell people that. This is her own little slice of the internet and she's allowed to do what she wants. She's not really hurting anyone, she's raising money for charity, the pictures are phenomenal.
People need to relax. She's 24 and getting death threats over what?
I mean worst case is she lied about photoshopping a picture? Yeah, so did Victoria Secret and EVERY SINGLE OTHER MEDIA PUBLICATION IN THE WORLD.
National Geographic did it for christ's sake...
Everyone here jumping down her fucking throat, out for blood. "Actually you lied, myehhh, this is bad and you're a bad person"
Like fuck off, I think she's well within her right to represent her art this way. Just because other publications continue to rip off artists for easy content and do very little research on their own doesn't mean she's doing anything wrong.
I think a disclaimer would remove a lot from the art. ARG's don't provide disclaimers, it adds to it. Especially in the early days of the internet "Is it, or is it not?" Is a fun game to play.
Also, nobody was hurt. This isn't disinformation in the sense you're telling people that jews run the world or that vaccines cause autism. Nobody is getting hurt. They're fun pictures. She told a cute ambiguous story. She has like 1000 followers. Everyone can just relax already.
What's wrong with digital composites? I know plenty of stunning works that are a result of combining photos, or drawing on top of a photo as a background, etc etc. Unless you specifically spread mistruth alongside your photo about how it was taken it's all good by me.
I'd be much more concerned with publications that find random imagery and use it uncritically, how worse would it get when generative visuals go really mainstream?
Putting aside the discussion about these particular photographs... There are clear lines, especially for certain types of photography. For things like reportage, documentary and true nature photography, the simplest rule is to represent reality, without addition, removal or significant alteration. In these circles even significantly cropping a photo can be seen as manipulative. Dodging and burning is mostly seen as processing, not material change to the photograph.
But importantly the rule is to not lie about the reality the photo depicts. Nature photography is as much about the effort or the hunt as it is the photo, so honest is key. Other photos have been removed from competitions and stripped of prizes due to misrepresentation, from editing to using tame animals. You can edit the photo's appearance through post processing of exposure, sharpness, etc... it is the subject that is important. Lying about the subject invalidates the photo.
Yes, both can have the same effect of selecting the editorial content of the photograph. With both methods (plus the selection of what photos from an event to publish) a photographer or their editor can choose what to convey. For example, if you have a photo of a group of people you can selectively crop, or frame in teh viewfinder, only the people that will convey an gripping editorial message, e.g remove or only include a certain demographic or action. If there are 1000 protesters standing around and 5 throwing stuff, the 5 will be photographed and reported as representative of the entire protest.
Is it a photograph of a snow leopard with some alterations in post processing or is it a photograph of a mountain range with a snow leopard inserted after. That is the line.
All photos are edited, the act of saving a pattern of light onto a film or digital sensor itself is a form of editing. The choice of camera, lens and parameters is a form of editing by itself.
Semi-pro landscape photographer here. It's true there are gray areas. But moving mountains and adding animals where animals could never be is not one of them.
I looked at a number of the pictures and I have no skin in this game but I'm not convinced. Many of the matches don't seem to actually be matches. One of the first for example - the lock of hair doesn't match any part of her hair and it's not crazy to think she may have brought some type of prop on a photo shoot.
Ever heard of tectonic plates? Those mountains are practically ripping around like they’re on a go-kart track, who knows where they’ll appear in photos.
This is the first I've encountered these pictures. I don't know anything about snow leopards but I've got tens of thousands of hours clocked in photoshop. Zooming way in on that supposed lock of hair could easily be a rumpled leather of a backpack or some other type of case. Even if it was altered, it could have been a distracting, unimportant element removed, like a colorful water bottle or something, without making it fake. The accusations are so forcefully presented that it seems like the author is trying to bluster their way through self doubt more than convince others.
First we create a culture of attention seeking and cute fake presentations, then we pick one random career/hobby at the start and ruin it, because we need attention too, then we discuss how screwed up it is under a microscope. Nature in its glory, a metapicture worth framing.
And the images in question are still being falsely advertised on their website with the exhilarating narrative. It's a pretty good scam in the digital world of art as long as it lasts.
'She never claimed to be a journalist, who expects it to be real or not fake, it's art!'
A few days later.....
'Elon is allowing people to say what they want, this spreads misinformation or perhaps fake news by people!'
But they aren't journalists? Is it okay? Is it art(lol)?
Heh..People making excuses for the things they personally like, or don't like.
Anyway, she is well within her right to make whatever she wants to spread it around dishonestly, but that has consequences depending on how she did it. Looks like she started the wrong way and she got called on it, so she is now reaping the consequences of it.
> Billionaire "Techno-King Genius" owning a platform and tweeting transphobic and racist conspiracies to hundreds of millions of people
"These are the same thing" ~ You
You can both be ok with narrative art and be against widespread misinformation campaigns that lead to tangible deaths and hate crimes. These are not conflicting viewpoints.
Yes, because Twitter boils all down to trans people having a safe place. Only a man could put on a dress then claim to be the most marginalized member of society.
she now admits on her website that some images are composites:
"To clarify, all my images are edited and processed in Photoshop and Lightroom. Some images are composites, some are not."
This article looks like the rant of someone completely unhinged. It's absolutely fucking wild to me that somebody would invest this amount of effort into investigating the authenticity of some random images ripped from Instagram or a blog.
I'd understand probing someone who had cheated to win a competition—a straight-up wrong act in my view—but I had no idea this particular hobby was filled with people who were quite so sensitive to the authenticity of photographs.
I think a normal journalistic reaction to "deception"—a clever word choice on your part—might be to say:
These photos from a random source which got spread widely look like they might be doctored, so we asked the photographer and they admitted/denied they were fabricated, this is why we agree/disagree and why genuine photography matters
Instead we get this ratcheting-up of drama, and I can't help but think encouraging a pile-on of death threats is really a healthy approach.
This is not a random source, and most importantly it is not a source without context.
If she had just posted these pics on her instagram with no comments I would be much more willing to say she never claimed anything and people just jumped on it. I probably wouldn't need to, however, because this whole thing wouldn't have happened in that case.
What she did is posting these pics on her website together with a whole story and presentation, with plenty of details and explanations, which makes her appear as a nature photographer on a difficult trip to spot a rare animal and who magically manages to find what she's looking for with a perfect setting, allowing her to snap incredible photography. Obviously such impressive photos will then circulate everywhere (and many people will ask to buy it).
Note that, despite the extensive description of her work for these pictures (i) there is not a single mention they are fake (prior to the disclaimer which was added later), (ii) the website is dedicated to those pictures and does not refer to her previous work on digital image (iii) before the deception was exposed she seemed very happy to be featured on newspaper since she included the article of the London Times.
My view is that this is genuine deceit, not just a person who published pictures without giving it much thoughts and simply found out afterwards that people misinterpreted it.
I find it particularly interesting that this comment continues to focus on the details of the extent to which this individual was dishonest—something that I'm sure is definitely possible, though I suspect a little overblown—rather than the low-quality and inflammatory tone of the response, which is something we can directly observe. But we each have our own concerns, I suppose.
What was the deception? I don't see anyone posting any evidence of claims that the photos are undoctored or manipulated and the artist in question makes a career of doing exactly that.
The only deception here is self deception from "journalists" who stole a published her image without bother to do any actual legwork.
> I had no idea this particular hobby was filled with people who were quite so sensitive to the authenticity of photographs
Well, I bet that people who invest enormous effort into actually capturing photos tend to be irritated by people who made collage and present it as areal.
I think it's fair to be irritated that someone has misled others. I also think this article steps far beyond "irritation", and that a responsible article should take basic steps—like seeking a comment from the person in question, and trying to avoid fanning the flames of an already overheated discussion.
Feels to me like there's a lot of 'a certain type of energy' in the article and some of the comments here. I can't really understand the level of bile being generated by these photos, real, semi-real, not-quite real or otherwise.
Curious, I agree – I don't think it's that strange that someone would object to the spread of manipulated photos as a photographer. But I do think there's a pretty big gulf between "curiosity" or "objection" and the sort of… wild-eyed, frothing-at-the-mouth tone of this poorly-written article.
I guess everybody is pendantic about something different. To you "It's absolutely fucking wild [...] that somebody would invest this amount of effort", but I can understand the point of that magazine, too.
Besides a somewhat harsh tone, they are presenting really solid facts, and kind of forensic work, to prove that nothing is like it seems in those images. And if you care a lot about life in/around mountains you are pendantic about local animals and where they appear (or can't appear).
This might be especially true if people have searched/visited that area a lot over the years, and never seen a snow leopard and then somebody comes along and just has that one in a million experience that nobody every had in that place.
Also the digital artist has tried to deceive the viewers into thinking that this is not a composited image: "Squinting through my camera’s telephoto lens, I noticed something in the shadow of Mount Pumori. At first, I thought it was a rock, but it was exactly what I was looking for."
So, was there a snow leopard _at all_ in the end or is that just another (stock) image? What is to be believed by that digital artist? I think this can anger people if they care a lot.
> News and media from around the world stole my images and published them with their own meaning. They did not ask me if they were edited. They interpreted them in their own way and spread them around the world. They told their followers that they were not edited. This is untrue, I always edit my images.
> In September-October, I traveled to Nepal, took photos, edited them, and posted them on my Facebook Page to my 2000 friends and 1100 followers. The story behind this series is true, all of the images are taken by me. I did in fact walk 103 miles to take those images. I gave permission to a select few places to share them. My intent for the entire series was to raise awareness of snow leopard conservation. I sold a little over 50 prints and donated $787.50 to the Snow Leopard Trust.