| 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 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.