Students hoax Paris Match

A pair of French students attending Strasbourg university won first place in Paris Match's photoreporting competition, a prize that came with €5000. But upon receiving the prize, they revealed that all their photos had been staged. From the British Journal of Photography:

Guillaume Chauvin and Rémi Hubert won for a reportage chronicling the harsh difficulties some poor students encounter while studying at the Strasbourg university. Their images showed students living in basements or offering sex to pay their rents. Another image portrayed a young man falling asleep in a bus as he embarked on a two-hour commute to his university. The reportage can be seen on Paris Match's website here.

The trick? All of the images had been faked, the two winners announced as they received the coveted prize on 24 June. ‘We though it was a bit caricatural,’ says one of the students to Le Monde newspaper. ‘We thought it would never win.’

Paris Match has now changed the rules of the competition to explicitly forbid fake reporting. You can see the photos here.

Photos

Posted on Fri Jun 26, 2009


Comments

Would fake reporting including misrepresenting the photograph, even if entirely inadvertent (i.e. the subject lying or the situation wasn't what the photographer thought it was)?
Posted by Joe  on  Fri Jun 26, 2009  at  10:58 PM
Wow, small world. I once got an award for falling asleep in a basement while paying for sex. It wasn't French, tho. Nor was the award. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink. You're welcome
Posted by Hairy Houdini  on  Sat Jun 27, 2009  at  10:29 AM
Reporters staging their photos? Who ever heard of such a thing?!?

The user interface on that page isn't all that great.
Posted by Accipiter  on  Sat Jun 27, 2009  at  11:59 PM
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