Photographer Souvid Datta admits plagiarizing the work of Mary Ellen Mark
May 4, 2017
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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Imitation can be a form of learning, and using other people’s photos to create something new is perfectly fine. But when one awarded photographer takes the work of the other, photoshops it in their own “documentary” photo, it’s wrong on so many levels.
Award-winning photographer Souvid Datta has been accused of stealing work from another renowned photographer, Mary Ellen Mark. And the evidence is more than evident. He took a woman from Mark’s image and badly photoshopped it in one of his own photos. After the scandal broke, Datta was silent for a while, but finally admitted that he really did clone a woman from Mark’s photo into his own work. What’s more, he admitted that some of his other work contains elements of stitching and cloning as well.
Datta’s series “In the Shadows of Kolkata” depicts the cycle of sexual violence among adults and children in Sonagachi, Kolkata, India. It’s one of the largest red light districts in all South Asia, and Datta documented the female sex workers, their clients and the children who are stuck in the middle. While watching his images, Shreya Bhat of Bangalore, India, noticed that there was something off and unnatural with one of the photos. She was right, and it didn’t take her long to figure out what was wrong.
The lady in the back of the photo was taken from one of the photos of Mary Ellen Mark, who was photographing prostitutes in Falkland Road, Bombay, India in 1978. Datta photoshopped the woman in one of his own photos, and frankly, he didn’t even do a good job. It doesn’t take long to realize something really is off in his photo, and the woman in the back looks like a drawing or a poster.
The story quickly hit the news and went viral, and since then Datta has taken down his website, Facebook, and Twitter. However, he gave an interview to TIME Magazine, in which he admitted that he doctored the images and expressed his regret:
In 2013-15, [when I was] aged 22-24, I foolishly doctored images, inexcusably lied about others’ work being my own and then buried these wrongdoings in the years that followed. Now these images are resurfacing, they threaten to undermine any work I have legitimately pursued since and, crucially, all the trust that the people in my photos, my collaborators and supporting institutions placed in me. I am so profusely sorry for this. I hope to begin making amends.
He says it wasn’t his goal to profit from Mary Ellen Mark’s image. He just wanted to see what it might have looked like had he somehow managed to persuade a brothel worker’s mentor to participate in photographing. Nevertheless, publishing a photo like this is unethical and even illegal, and it harmed photographer’s reputation on so many levels.
First of all, Datta has won a number of awards over the years, including the PDN 30, the Pulitzer Centre Grant, Getty Grant for Editorial Photography, Magnum Photos 30 Under 30 Award and other. The act of doctoring the images can indeed undermine his other work and all the awards he has received so far. Then, it puts into question all his work that will follow, as he’s really let down his audience and their trust. Since Mary Ellen Mark’s images are under copyright, adapting them and then publishing for commercial purposes is also illegal. And finally, the bad Photoshop job he’s done is just one more disgrace in this entire scandal.
I was really shocked when I saw this photo and read the story. This is not a way a professional, award-winning photographer would act. Still, according to the interview, Datta deeply regrets what he did, and hopes to correct his wrongdoings to everyone who was damaged in this story. Sadly, I believe he’s the one who will suffer the most damage in the end. A slip like this is enough to ruin an entire career, especially since he admitted that some of his other photos were manipulated as well. I would like to believe he’s learned his lesson and won’t do it again, especially since it’s an older work. But in my opinion, it’s hard not to be suspicious towards someone’s work in the future after they’ve done something like this. What do you think? Is it possible for Datta to regain credibility? Or this is it, the career of the photographer ends here?
[via TIME Magazine, petapixel; image credits: Mary Ellen Mark, Souvid Datta]
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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25 responses to “Photographer Souvid Datta admits plagiarizing the work of Mary Ellen Mark”
End
Done.
You dick!
Once the hype has blown over I’m Sure he’ll survive…
If nothing he can make a career as a retouching expert.
End
He was a photographer. Until he learned photoshop.
I kinda feel like most modern “photographers” would be lost without some sort of software. For many of my photos, raw conversion is the “end” of the process. Spending time at the computer, editing, is not my idea of fun or art.
No.
It’s not us who decide that, it’s his future clients. And as we’ve seen again and again, if “famous” photographers are being caught plagiarising, all it takes is a long public letter of apology and they’re back in business. Possibly even stronger than before thanks to “exposure by negative publicity”. Jasmin Star, anyone?
Ha, Jasmine Star….
what about her? :/
However, you can’t compare what Datta did with what Jasmin Star did, let alone the controvesy that hounded Steve McCurry last year! No long public letter is gonna fix that considering that more of his work may not be the real thing! His next career move is get out of photography altogether!
Here’s the most damning part from the Time piece:
“The damning mistake came in uploading that image onto my blog. I did this without accreditation or acknowledgment that it had been tampered with and that it included elements of [Mark’s] image. I wrote the caption as if Asma herself was in this image, not a woman from someone else’s work. In effect, I lied.”
And
“During this same period, there were other lapses of judgment where I used imagery without acknowledgment, including that of Hazel Thompson and Raul Irani’s work. Two of their images, along with those which I altered, were also included in my submissions for early photography competitions in 2014, though not published commercially anywhere.”
Put simply, if these cases were images that were dug up from somewhere long forgotten that did not matter these days, and he changed his ways, it wouldn’t be so damning. It would be plenty bad, but perhaps not enough to be career ending.
But the whole thing was fairly recent and not only it was still there, other doctored and stolen images were also submited for competitions. He was effectively still reaping the benefits of blatant copyright violation. It really puts in doubt if part of his success wasn’t built on top of the work of others.
And the excuse that he came up with that early in career when he didn’t know better blah blah doesn’t bode well. It’s easy for him to say he will never do this again now that he got some prizes and has some ammount of recognition, but it’s very hard to trust that he wouldn’t fall back to such strategies if his career gets stalled again for some reason. This is the problem with trust.
Then again, I’m not the one who’s gonna judge. Let the clients, and perhaps the photographers that got their work stolen in future lawsuits, do it.
why even bother? the photo was fine without the added stolen bit.
It was, indeed.
End. Unfortunate too because he documents some important subjects that in the grand scheme of things are rarely covered; he didn’t need to do this.
Finished.
He’s not sorry…. He’s sorry for getting caught… To truly be sorry, one has to understand the damage they are responsible for… If they feel their message, their story, or their art is more important than the feelings of the one they STOLE from (because taking from someone, something that CANNOT BE GIVEN BACK, without permission is stealing), then they will justify in their own minds why it is/was okay to procure/appropriate said material/subject matter… They may openly apologize, but only so mush so as to get some to recognize their message as an apology.
I think s/he can restore it, but s/he has to work a lot harder and have to live with people questioning him/her.
This actually would have been really, really cool if he’d been open about it from the start. I love when artists reassemble the elements of famous works to give them new meaning. It’s the dishonesty that’s really troubling.
Everybody make a mistake.
I waited sometime to comment cos I didn’t want to sound sanctimonious. We all make mistakes and I believe we should all be given a chance to learn from the mistakes. But it’s the Time apology that has convinced me this guy is not sorry at all. Too many justifications for his actions, Too much of that ‘pressure ‘ excuse. From his interview I got the feeling that he still cannot see that damage he has done to everyone involved, especially to people in the photographs. What was the point of him having expensive education (I read somewhere he studied at Harrow) winning awards and accolades for his work if he cannot even see that what he did was not ‘appropriate’ but ‘steal’ from people. Creating fake stories. And that is a cardinal rule he broke in the profession he is working. He is not sorry. All his other works will whether with a lot of ethical care or not will be in question. Will he return the cash prizes he won? Will the other grantee’s put a disclaimer on his work like the Alexia Foundation? Will we forget easily and see his work in a few years time?
But my other problem is this need for every grants, awards in the photo-journalistic field to look for the sensational image, the image that depicts the poorest, the worst of human conditions to make themselves feel better. It doesn’t matter that a young girl was being raped first by the man client and secondly by the photographer. Even as a photographer did you need to depict such brutality for what? These images have not changed the conditions of these victims. The image itself is so kitschy and so in your face. It only arouses anger and disgust at the photographers need to show the victim not the men who daily victimise these young girls and keep them enslaved for their desire. Where are their faces? What was the point of showing the girl’s face? To shame her or to pity her? Or to impress the judges at the access to your subjects? Nothing in this image that LensCulture used makes sense apart from the sensational factor to draw in the crowd and get more fees. I think there are a lot of stories from countries like India that needs focus. All stories that deals with human conditions especially of the girl child or weaker and marginalised sections of society needs to be talked about but not this way.
All in all a complete failure on the part of Souvid Datta, the photo-editors and Photo-shop.
If he was so aware of what he was doing, and knew it was wrong, why didn’t he come forward himself? Why did it take someone spotting the theft for him to come clean. I’m sure he does feel remorseful. THAT HE GOT CAUGHT!
I don’t care if anyone ever buys my art, looks at my art or tosses it. It’s MINE! People like Datta give a bad name to the true artists in this world. This guy just went further, accepting awards for who-knows-whose art!
And, as if it needed one more stab, Photoshop is under attack – again! Photoshop is NOT the plagiarist. The thief who performs such transgressions on the program IS!
This irks me! Can ya tell? LOL
But Richard Prince is still at large?