Two students con Paris Match's photojournalism prize
French magazine Paris Match was the victim of a hoax when it was revealed that this year's winners of its Photojournalism Award had faked their images
Every year, Paris Match, which remains one of the last weekly magazine to give predominant space to photography, organises its ‘Grand Prix Paris Match du Photoreportage.’ This year, the prize, which comes with €5000 and ten pages in Paris Match, was awarded to two students attending Strasbourg’s university.
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.’
However, terms and conditions don’t forbid faked reportages – a situation that is likely to change next year. Already, Paris Match has withdrawn its cash prize, offering it, instead, to the two student’s university of decorative arts in Strasbourg. The weekly magazine, which is now warning readers that the images have been faked, has also announced that next year’s cash prize will be increased to €10,000 as a result of this year’s ‘fraud’.
View the reportage here.
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