Stepan Rudik has been a freelance photographer for the past two years, after a five-year stint as a press photographer. Virtually unknown a month ago, the photographer went from winning third prize in the World Press Photo in the story sports features category, which he tells BJP 'overjoyed' him to being known as the Ukrainian photographer that was disqualified shortly thereafter.

On 03 March, more than three weeks after the World Press Photo winners were revealed, the Dutch organisation announced that "after careful consultation with the jury, [it has] determined that is was necessary to disqualify Stepan Rudik, winner of the 3rd prize story in Sports Features, due to violation of the rules of the World Press Photo Contest." Rudik won the prize for his story "Street fighting, Kiev, Ukraine".

The organisation added: "Following the announcement of the contest results, it came to the attention of World Press Photo that Rudik's story had violated a contest rule. After requesting RAW-files of the series from him, it became clear that an element had been removed from one of the original photographs." Speaking to BJP, a spokeswoman for World Press Photo says that the photographer had removed the foot of one its subjects from a photo.

Last week, Rudik told BJP that while he didn't argue with the judges' decision, he didn't think he "made any signifiant alteration nore removed any important informative detail" from his photo. However, the photographer has continued to come under attack for the extreme post-processing of his photos. Today, he tells BJP in an exclusive interview that he was within his right to crop and submit a black-and-white photo despite shooting in colour.

"In my opinion, the so called 'objectivity' ends where the picture frame starts," Rudik tells BJP. "And black and white photography itself - is it objective? Has anybody seen the black and white world? A photographer chooses at the time of photographing to take a bit to the left or a bit to the right. I find the comments that one should not crop the already shot frame ridiculous. It is my right as the author to crop from the shot frame as I think proper in order to highlight the detail I need for creating the series. In my case, I think that what I did can be equated to retouching, as if it were a defect of a film."

The retouching, at first, went unnoticed. The World Press Photo judges only requested the photographer's raw files a week after announcing the winners. "As far as I know, they learnt from a letter sent by a group of Ukrainian photographers - whose names I don't know and honestly I don't care to find it out - that there was another version of the same image,an non-retouched version with the part of the foot, which I used to exhibit before the submission to the WPP contest on one of the Russian-speaking photo weblogs."

He adds: "I don't know yet how it will affect my career. I decided to publish the original photograph in the first place in order to preserve my reputation, since I was not happy with the wording 'disqualified for removal of an element from a photograph' in the World Press Photo press release without explanation what exactly had been changed in the picture." Speaking to BJP, the organisation declined to provide more details about the alteration when contacted on 03 March.

However, Rudik hopes the controversy won't overshadow his work, especially his "winning" series. The reportage follows Ukrainian street fighters. "I once met a guy who told me that he was a member of one of such groups of street fighters, and that they were meeting with other groups once a month to practice," he tells BJP. "There are about 150-200 such groups in Kiev. It's a closed event, where only friends are allowed. They meet in the outskirts of the city. They call it a 'fair play', each group fields equal amount of fighters for a fight, they don't beat those who are already lying on the ground, and they fight until all the fighters of one of the groups are brought low. I chose to photograph them, because I photograph life, and this is one of its manifestations, it's the life of these youth."

Rudik, who lives and work in Poland and has a scholarship from the Polish National Culture Centre, has moved on to his next project - a reportage about Poland. "As a photographer I like to document different aspects of life, and I am interested in all subjects except the boring ones."