“Two French students were awarded the annual Grand Prix du Photoreportage Etudiant last week to honor a photographic story that presented images documenting the precarious lives of students today and the things they must do in order to survive and succeed.
“The only catch is that the entire story was a fake.”
This is from commercial photographer Chase Jarvis’s blog post this morning, and if this topic sounds interesting – how could it not? – you can get a full overview of the story at this post of Horses Think.
Jarvis’s coverage and insight on the topic is interesting, and rings true with me. In part, he says:
“I think what they’ve done is not to make brilliant photojournalism, but to make brilliant art. There was certainly a significant price to be paid for that art, or perhaps many prices: the reputation of the award, the reputation of the judges, even their own reputations perhaps — and only time will tell — but they’ve surely made some brilliant statements about the nature of such imagery, called into question the cliched nature of the traditional canons recognizing that work, and made us all pause, even if just for a moment, to consider what photojournalism really is.”
While I fall into the “photojournalist” category of photographers, I deeply appreciate good conceptual art. And truly good conceptual art gets us thinking, pushing boundaries and more often than not, pushes buttons — big time.
There’s not doubt that the two French students behind this hoax have pissed off more than a few people, but they wouldn’t have been able to do so if photojournalism, by nature, were not so susceptible to fraud.
Jarvis mentions the reputations of the judges being on the line. And so they should be. But if I were one of those judges, I would be grateful for the wakeup call. All of us who care about journalism should get a wake up call every day, never forgetting that while there may be such thing as journalistic integrity, there is no such thing as objectivity.
What I really appreciate about this hoax is that it is a hoax, in the sense that the two perpetrators — Guillaume Chauvin and Remi Huberr, art students at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs of Strasbourg — did this to call attention to an issue, to call into question issues of photojournalism, but not to disseminate false information to a actual news-digesting audience.
One of Jarvis’s commentors says that he/she finds the hoax “both brilliant and disturbing,” but doesn’t elaborate. I, too, find it brilliant and disturbing: Brilliant in the way that two students have shown us how easily we can be disturbed, which relates to the very disturbing fact that we never seem to fail to believe what we see and read, no matter how many times we learn that we should question, question, question.
I say give a mightily applause to Chauvin and Huberr. They might never get jobs as photojournalists – even though they are award-winners – but the certainly seem to have a future in button-pushing, thought-provoking art. As Jarvis says:
“I dunno about you, but if I hired artists for a living, I’d want those guys’ brains and talents on my team. Of course they might stab you in the back in the name of art, but they’re clearly good at finding a point and making it clearly.”