The organizing committee of the 2010 Human and Water competition, a Chinese international photography contest, has stripped the winner of his title after he was found to have plagiarized the work of another artist.
The fraudulent winner, Zhang Ziping, entered a digitally manipulated version of a photograph by Ren Shichen, a Lanzhou-based newspaper photographer. The image features two people carrying water along a mountainous road. Shichen spotted the photo among the listed winners on the internet and contacted the committee, remarking, “I didn’t participate in the competition, how could my work win the top award?”
Ziping reversed and cropped Shichen’s original image, which was one of a series of photos taken in over one hundred drought-stricken villages since 1999, in which time Shichen said he has spent almost 100,000 yuan traveling villages in Western China that have suffered drought.
Of Ziping, Shichen said, “He downloaded my work from the internet and changed it with image processing software.”
Li Jingfeng, a member of the organizing committee, stated that “Over 2,000 separate photos were in the contest but we could not verify the authenticity of each photo.” However he claims that they did have very strict procedures, and the winning photos were displayed online so that members of the public could report irregularities.
The organizing committee decided last Friday to strip Ziping of his award, after he failed to provide any evidence of his ownership of the prize-winning photograph. An online notice was issued to cancel Ziping’s award. The committee also sent an apology letter to Ren Shichen.
Ziping's winning image, 2010.
Shichen's original image, 2007.
