What Do You Do When Someone Travels Around The World To Copy You

Some cases of plagiarism are the usual copy-the-photo-and-present-as-their-own, but this one found by Pratik Naik and Bella Kotak just tops them all. At the base of the story are Lauren Bullen and Jack Morris two travel photographers and some of Instagram’s power couples, and Instagram’s favorite travel power couple with just over two million followers combined.

Yesterday, Lauren shared one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever seen. An instagramer is not only following the couple, but copying their every photo, down to the smallest details, like wardrobe, hards, composition, even the food. While copying someone’s work is never a good thing to do, the amount of investment needed to copy someone who constantly travels around the world is just unconsibile.

Pratik says it quite right “Ask yourself, what would you do if one of your followers dedicated their entire social media presence into mimicking every minor detail of your work? Now, they follow your footsteps across the globe in order to continue that obsession.”

And I agree with Pratik: it’s creepy.

Lauren calls the imitator right out, but she is also shocked that someone will go through all the effort and take the resources needed to recreate the photos:

Also the amount of time and pre-organising she put into arranging the outfits, I don’t promote and tag everything I wear, so that would have taken a lot of time and work, even down to the anklets and necklace. Not to mention the cost of all this- those outfits and accommodations don’t come at a cheap price. A lot of what jack and I do is work with companies and brands to create imagery & promotion- this is our business and how we are able to continue to create this for everyone.
I woke jack up to show him what I had been shown in the middle of the night and we both were extremely confused and shocked & I quickly took screen shots of all the posts, Jack was already blocked.. probably because one of her images wasn’t even hers, she had just taken jacks picture and posted it as her own..

You can judge for yourself, originals are on the left, imitator are on the right (photos via the retouchist)