Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/08/28

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Subject: RE: [Leica] Photo scandal at National Geographic!!!
From: "Emanuel Lowi" <mano@proxyma.net>
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 22:41:04 -0400

As someone who has worked as a photo "fact checker" for NG, I can tell you that the
magazine is extremely rigorous about verifying the authenticity of photos depicting
people and places. Photographers are sometimes caught by the magazine faking such
images. In fact, it would take a significant conspiracy to evade detection.

The person who created these bird/bug images seems to have taken advantage of the
fact that these are photos of, er, a bird and a bug -- really hard to authenticate
unless one has very specialized knowledge of those specific species and their
intertwined behaviours. It would normally be the photo researcher's job to find such
an expert (or several) in order to corroborate what the images purported to depict. 

Perhaps someone dropped that ball. I'd be curious to know whether the research into
this Hungarian photographer's work was done by the folks in Washington or by the
people staffing the Hungarian operation. I've been worried for some time about the
proliferation of foreign language editions, as some of them were started up for
sometimes curious reasons (the Hebrew language Israeli edition is one case of that)
and I worry a little about whether or not the NGS standards may have flagged with
every mile they've travelled away from the original very tight ship.

Emanuel Lowi
Montreal

P.S. Gil Grosvenor has had relatively little to do with the magazine for some years.
Nice guy, though.
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