or ‘For a fistful of pixels’.
World Press website
This post is also an attempt to apologise with the unknown photographer for the previous comments I made on the Facebook forum promoted by The British Journal of Photography on the matter. In that circumstance, in fact, I suggested that the disqualified photo (from being 3rd winner at the World Press 2010 for Sport Features stories) was cropped so much that would put the whole representation out-of-context, the context of a story called “Street fighting, Kiev, Ukraine”, ‘while the original picture seems taken out of a rather innocent sport event’, as I unhappily commented.
disqualified photo © Stepan Rudik
original raw photo © Stepan Rudik
I was terribly wrong. When in fact the first blogs started coming out with the whole series of pictures from the World Press Competition, it became immediately clear to me that not just the photo in question was well-within the context of the event narrated, but also, and crucially, that the series is a terrific reportage of a practice of street fighting. The photographs entered the competition as story (Sports Features: 3rd prize stories), not as single shot as I originally thought. This misunderstanding is even more recurrent in the articles and posts around the web, as they all focus on the manipulated photo, treating the competition entry as ‘single’ and not as a ‘story’. Therefore the jury – made of very experienced photographers and people working in the media industry – should have fully understood that, and acknowledged the photographer’s effort to be there, his relationship with ‘gatekeepers’, and his ability at documenting this dramatic practice, rather than rehearsing the fable of ‘authenticity’ and the chimera of photographic ‘truth’.
I decided to copy and publish the photographs in question, as: a) they have already been published on the Net; b) full credits are given to the author, who in fact only gets more deserved notoriety from this, and; c) the link to the original source is provided.
So, first and foremost I think we need to give credits to this ‘obscure’ photographer to have done a terrific job out there (however disputable his choice of dramatically cropping the photograph presented might be), and secondly we need to ask what are the “currently accepted standards in the industry” according to which the World Press jury disqualified the picture of the hand? In the name of the ‘integrity of our organization’ [hmmm?] and ‘high standards in photojournalism’ [sic! sic! sic!] they had to disqualify Mr. Rudik from the competition. It was the covering of a half foot behind the hand to have trigger the decision of the jury….that is frankly a disputable decision, in my modest opinion: it does not move by a bit the ‘content’ of the photo, it just corrects a slightly white dot under the blackish band. How many times, in fact, we crop, edit, and desaturate photographs in order to enhance details, to hide imperfections, or to tell a slightly different story? And, isn’t the moment of ‘shooting’ a choice in itself? Too many variables come into place before we can only think about ‘truth’ in photography, especially in the era of the digital output. The photographs in the series below, on the other hand, are so terribly ‘real’, and their attachment to the trace (of flesh and blood, literally) of the ‘real’ is far too deep to be dismissed by a few manipulated pixels. Finally speaking to the British Journal of Photography, the young free-lance photographer explains: “There are about 150-200 such groups in Kiev. It’s a closed event, where only friends are allowed. They meet in the outskirts of the city. They call it a ‘fair play’, each group fields equal amount of fighters for a fight, they don’t beat those who are already lying on the ground, and they fight until all the fighters of one of the groups are brought low”.
My impression is rather that the ‘Institute’ is striving at protecting an increasingly nervous ‘profession’, by drawing strict boundaries to the ‘discipline’, right during a dramatic and unstoppable technological change in the practice. It is almost impossible to find Rudik’s photographs submitted for the competition. On the other hand, most of the web around professional photography is focusing only on the singular photo and the presumed violation, and they are all getting quite hysterical in dismissing this guy and re-claiming the ‘truth’ violated: all for a fistful of pixels…. Is/should be there a ‘digital ethics’, as some of these discussions seem to imply? Or is it a ‘generational’ conflict between the old guard of BW film processing specialists and the new wave of Photoshop enthusiasts? And who created that aesthetic cliché for photojournalism that’s got to be BW, grainy, ‘film effect’, burned margins, dramatic cropping in order to stake a chance?
And would Stepan have left the photographs in colour, then we might have had a chance to ‘relax’ a bit more about the context in which the story unfolds? We might have had an opportunity to move away from these clichés and instead appreciate the festive climate of ‘sportive’ event in which the confrontation effectively seems to have taken place: teasing, smiling and unwritten rules of the game are here as equally important as the moral judgement of the viewers.
You can now see more work from Stepan Rudik here: I am particularly impressed by his work on migrants and the station in Moscow.
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
disqualified photo © Stepan Rudik
raw photo © Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
© Stepan Rudik
disqualified photo © Stepan Rudik
raw photo © Stepan Rudik
{ 1 } Comments
This is a really interesting example of an issue that serious photojournalism cannot but deal with. It seems to me there are two quite different issues here. The first might be regarded as the extreme cropping and processing of the questioned image. It doesn’t make for a bad photograph (in fact, quite the reverse), but it *does* significantly alter the context and to some extent the content of the story. Without it, for instance, one would not necessarily be aware that fists are bandaged prior to fighting. The line that one might take on this rests probably more on subjective, aesthetic grounds than it does ‘ethical’ grounds.
The second issue is the more pressing one — that of digital manipulation that changes the actual content of the image. If World Press Photo says that the current, accepted industry practice is that nothing must be removed or added, then I think Rudik’s disqualification falls into context: the foundation is trying to hold the line on a policy that must, even at the best of times, be under the constant threat of gradual erosion.
Based on this, it would seem that the decision is the correct one — or at least, the strictly accurate one.
However, what interests me is what the reaction might have been had the offending foot simply been ‘burnt out’ rather than removed? Would that (whether performed in the conventional darkroom or digitally) have constituted the same offence?
The real issue here is that there has to be a line in the sand. Whether an excised foot or added smoke and missile strikes (clearly alterations very different in magnitude but arguably not in principle), the line in the sand exists: nothing removed and nothing added. It seems to me that the foundation could make no other decision. The moment it allows *some* extraneous details to be removed from the published portion of the photograph it will open the door to a case-by-case judgement call on every photograph for which it has responsibility.
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