- I dislike being lied to in general

- 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.

PS

I am not a photographer.

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.

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.

> I certainly would think the images are unaltered

You should consider developing your critical thinking skills.

The parent explained exactly how their critical thinking skills led them to believe the images are unaltered.

Instead of belittling them, do you have examples of things which they could have picked up to imply that the images were altered?

I'd start by reading the disclaimer at the very top of every page.

Note that this disclaimer is barely visible - and just got added, it was not there for example on 2022-11-27. See https://web.archive.org/web/20221127123427/https://kittiyapa...

What was displayed before was "WORLDWIDE SHIPPING AVAILABLE FOR PRINTS" and only on general print page disclaimer was mentioned.

And individual pages were trying to pass fake collages as "Photography by Kittiya Pawlowski" - see https://web.archive.org/web/20221127122923mp_/https://kittiy...

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.

https://annualphotoawards.com/winners/apa-2020/fine-art/

> Nobody who takes photography seriously as a profession

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.

Seriously, take a moment, pretend this isn't a stranger on the internet but one of your friends and have some fucking empathy.

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.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211218023642/https://studiokit...

Honestly, thanks for the clarification.

This is nonsense.

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.

> One should not produce photographic art without

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.

I agree, there is no correct or incorrect way to do art or express yourself (with some obvious exclusions like racism, harassment, etc)

Who said "correct or incorrect" besides you? This conversation is about whether a photographer can be criticized for posting faked pictures (they can).

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.

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.

> 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.

See https://kittiyapawlowski.com/news-publications/published-in-...

On https://web.archive.org/web/20221127122923mp_/https://kittiy... they were peddling fake collages as "Photography by Kittiya Pawlowski"

Had

> Member of the World Photography Organization since 2016

in footer.

Had

> Help fund Kittiya's next photography expedition to Antarctica

in sidebar.

Do you also get mad that Salvador Dalí paintings don't carry a disclaimer that they are not real?

I would be irritated if someone would present Salvador Dalí paintings as depiction of real situation, with convincing backstory claiming that.

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.

well, teleporting mountain ranges are even less likely and this would be also needed to create images that they attempted to pass as real photographs