Updated | Feb. 26: World Press stands by its decision to award Paolo Pellegrin second place in the general news category of their contest.
A dramatic image of a man described as a former Marine sniper clutching a shotgun in the Crescent — a rough part of Rochester — helped the Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin win honors as Freelance Photographer of the Year from POYi.
Except the man in the photo, Shane Keller, was never a sniper, but a former combat photographer. And he lives in a part of Rochester where he says he can go to sleep at night with his doors unlocked.
Mr. Keller’s questions about how and where he was portrayed were at the heart of a post on BagNewsNotes that called Mr. Pellegrin’s ethics into question. The post also noted that a description for the series was taken from a decade-old New York Times story. Mr. Keller, who graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology last year, said he felt what had been originally described to him as a portrait looked more like a staged, faux-documentary image. He shared his unease with Loret Steinberg, a former journalism ethics professor of his and co-author of the BagNews Notes article.
“I have a deep belief in journalism and documentary work that we have an understanding, an agreement, with the audience that we speak to,” Ms. Steinberg said in an interview Friday. “We tell them that we’re showing them something that is authentic, that we’ve seen and found, so that we can understand something about the world we live in. And clearly if Shane is misrepresented, if the context of the Crescent is changed, then we’re not doing that.”
Mr. Pellegrin was not asked for comment by the post’s authors, however.
“I didn’t want to call Paolo,” she said. “I wanted to write this from the vantage point of raising a discussion.”
Mr. Pellegrin, who spoke with Lens on Friday, said he could not understand how he could be accused of an ethical breach and not be given the chance to defend himself. “It seems somewhat strange to me that while mounting a purported journalistic high horse they themselves did not follow the basic tenets of fair and professional journalism,” he said in a statement.
Later, in a telephone interview, he said he stood by the photograph and never claimed that it was taken in the Crescent, but that it was part of an attempt to explore gun culture within the larger context of his project. He said the information for the description for the series that was taken from The Times was never meant to be published, but had been provided as background information. He also said he was unsure if he misunderstood Mr. Keller’s military background, but had done a portrait of him while he was going to a local shooting range.
Despite the controversy over the images, Mr. Pellegrin, an Italian native who lives in Rome and New York, remained resolute.
“I took formal portraits in the house, then we’d go to this shooting place, so I took some more pictures downstairs, in what is a garage area,” Mr. Pellegrin said. “Then, things start to blend, so it’s not a formal look-at-me, I’m-taking-your-picture kind of portrait. We’re in the same space, I’ve been accepted, I’m there, so I’m taking pictures. Which is how that picture was taken. What I have to say is that I stand by the pictures.”
Rick Shaw, director of POYi, said in a statement that his organization “respects the integrity of all the photojournalists” and “will not presume any lapse of ethics or review any situation until we get a position statement from the photographer and review all the allegations.”
Screenshot from POYi, photo by Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos Screenshot of Paolo Pellegrin’s image of Shane Keller on the Pictures of the Year International Web site. Mr. Pellegrin won first place in the Photographer of the Year — Freelance/Agency category. The photo was included in more than one award-winning contest entry.The origins of this debate date to a brief encounter last year when a group of Magnum photographers descended on Rochester to document parts of the city, whose main employer — Kodak — has been such a central part of their own professional lives. Students at R.I.T. helped some of them as fixers and guides. Brett Carlsen drove Mr. Pellegrin around town.
“The thing is, someone was going to do George Eastman, someone was going to do this, someone was going to do that, someone was going to do Kodak, someone was doing architecture — stuff like that — so he wanted to be the guy who did the underbelly of it,” Mr. Carlsen said. “So that’s what we were looking for when we were driving around for two or three days, and I helped him.”
They concentrated on the Crescent, where Mr. Pellegrin said he was shocked by the crime and violence. He said he asked Mr. Carlsen how he could get at the “larger issue” of violence and gun culture.
That is when they paid a visit to Mr. Keller, a military veteran and a gun owner.
“They wanted to come over and do a portrait photo of me with my firearms,” Mr. Keller said. “He ended up photographing Brett by himself and me by myself. This is in my apartment, white walls, a clean apartment. He wanted us to fire some of the firearms at a shooting range. One of the first things I thought was that’s strange, asking us to do something. I’m a student, he’s Magnum. I not going to question him.”
As they went to the garage, he said Mr. Pellegrin wanted to take another picture.
“When he saw what it looked like in the garage, he wanted to be able to shoot more portraits of me downstairs,” Mr. Keller said. “I agreed, and we talked about which firearm he wanted me to hold. The shotgun was the one he wanted. I had shotgun shells I could put over my shoulder.”
Mr. Keller said he found it odd that Mr. Pellegrin never asked for his full name or any other information that could have been used to identify the photograph or location. He also said he had no idea what larger story the photographer was pursuing in Rochester. Not did he wonder how the picture would be used.
Until last week, when he saw the photo on the World Press Photo Web site.
When he saw the image among a prize-winning portfolio — it also took second place for the general news stories category in the World Press Photo contest — Mr. Keller was uneasy. He said he thought the image was staged to give the impression it was a candid moment in an ominous location.
“I spoke with one of my friends this morning who was also a combat photographer and Iraq veteran,” said Mr. Keller, who now freelances for The York Daily Record in Pennsylvania. “He looked at it and didn’t see it as a portrait. He sees like a ride-along. It doesn’t look like a portrait. That’s where it turns into this gray area.”
Mr. Carlsen, who was driving Mr. Pellegrin, said he did not think the photographer set out to misrepresent his friend. He said there might have been some problem because of language that made Mr. Pellegrin misunderstand Mr. Keller. And even the question of which neighborhood they were in could be explained as an outsider’s unfamiliarity. (At the same time, critics of Mr. Pellegrin’s project have said it was his very nature as an outsider that produced a distorted view of the area.)
Mr. Pellegrin said he might have made an honest mistake by not identifying Mr. Keller properly. But he said his own basic information for the image was Rochester, not the Crescent. An assistant, he said, put the image into a contest entry, as well as the series description that had first appeared in The Times, which he never had intended to be published.
“I find this all a little bit ridiculous,” Mr. Pellegrin said. “I don’t understand what the big controversy is about. He mentions that I didn’t mention his name. I forgot his name. I don’t know how many people — how many situations, that day, that week, those two weeks that I was there — when I went back home, yes, I forgot his name. What I remember was that he was a former soldier.”
Update | Feb. 26, 11:35 a.m.: The World Press Photo contest issued this statement:
Upon reviewing the image and caption of former Marine Shane Keller in Paolo Pellegrin’s story on The Cresent that was awarded a second prize in the general news category of the World Press Photo contest 2013, the jury is of the opinion that although a more complete and accurate introduction and captions should have been made available by the photographer, the jury was not fundamentally mislead by the picture in the story or the caption that was included with it.
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