Fake Photo Essay Wins Paris Match Prize

Here's some fresh ammo for anyone who thinks photo contests too often celebrate clichés.

Paris Match magazine recently awarded its annual grand prize for photo reportage to a pair of art students who admitted they staged the whole project.

Their photo essay is series of blurry, grainy, black-and-white images. They show French students in various states of despair: One is sleeping in a car, another rests his head on a desk, two pick up trash. 

When their cliché-ridden project actually won, the student photographers announced the hoax to the judges. They said they were trying to draw attention to student poverty and make a statement about the nature of visual information. 

The Independent reports:

"Before they received their trophy and €5,000 (£4,260) cheque at a ceremony on Wednesday, the prize-winners, Guillaume Chauvin and Rémi Hubert, read out a statement admitting to the hoax, stating that they had wanted to make a 'powerful artistic gesture' attacking the 'voyeurism' and gullibility of parts of the press. The prize jury looked crestfallen but managed to applaud all the same."

Needless to say this stunt is an embarrassment for Paris Match and its contest judges. The British Journal of Photography notes that Paris Match withdrew the prize and published a note to readers saying the images had been faked.

What's interesting about this project is the images by themselves communicate no facts, only feelings. When the photos are labeled as genuine and tied to a social concern—in this case, student poverty—they become important and affecting. We wonder if the students could have made this point without resorting to lying.

Comments

[Giulio Sciorio]

Sounds like the winners have a bright future in advertising.

[anderson schneider]

The role of art is confronting the boundaries of reality. Bravo!

This is one more proof that the power of journalism must to come from the credibility of its authors and not from the nature of the medium.

[MarcW]

That's a tough one.

I have to say that since the students announced the hoax *before* accepting the prize, and did have an aim other than embarrassing the people giving the contest, I can't really call them immoral.

However, while of course photo contests are cliche-suckers, staging photos of this sort is not difficult and there's absolutely no way to tell a picture of an actor acting depressed at a desk from a real student being depressed at a desk, so the judges of the contest probably didn't deserve to be humiliated quite that way.

[Marisa]

This is so ridiculous. They have no respect for the competition and wasted people's time and effort as if we didn't already know that images lie. What they basically demonstrated is that artists lie, specifically them. That's not anything new. Perhaps they should research the history of photography before they make all these redundant "artistic gestures". Ever heard of Pedro Meyer? Did he have to lie? No. Much more powerful.