Why Take Pictures?

As the late Joe O'Donnell has demonstrated, there's no reason you can't be a famous photographer. You don't even need to have taken any famous pictures.

Except if, by "taken," you mean "stolen."

O'Donnell, as you may have read in Marianne Fulton's article on The Digital Journalist, is a "photographer" who evidently made himself famous by claiming other photographers' work as his own. He also claimed to have been a White House photographer when he wasn't, and to have been covering presidents at a time when he was actually 14 years old.

How good was the scam? Good enough to fool Katie Couric of CBS, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Fox News, The Tennessean, American Photo, and many other reputable news outlets, which all fell for the fake story. (The Tennessean may have originated it.) Most reported, in O'Donnell's obituary, that he had taken the famous picture of John-John Kennedy saluting his slain father's caisson passing. Except that he didn't. That one was taken by Stanley Stearns.

(It's an interesting story, too—Marianne Fulton tells it.)

What will be interesting to watch from here is whether, when, and in what way these various news outlets retract, correct, or otherwise make up for their erroneous reporting.

_________________

Mike

UPDATE from Stephen Gilbert: "Editor and Publisher has a piece on the O'Donnell story, with a response from his son." 

From Mike: I heard from the reporter who wrote the O'Donnell obit in The Tennessean, Jonathan Marx, after contacting him asking for a comment on the record. He responded that he's on deadline and hasn't yet "been able to get to the bottom of all of it." He says, "Because we know that Mr. O'Donnell was in fact a photographer for the U.S. Information Agency and he did photograph on official business at the White House, it would appear that some of the images credit[ed] to him are his. What we don't know is how and why other images were credited to him."

I asked him where he got his information in the first place, since his article preceded the article in The New York Times (a fact Marianne Fulton perhaps missed?). Of course that's a relatively silly request, since he's under no obligation to tell me what his sources were. So I asked him whether there will be a follow-up article in The Tennessean about the matter. I'll let you know what he says.

Comments

[Dogman]

As Stan Sterns said, "The main rule of Journalism 101 is check your source—no one did that."

I am amused. Sloppy work all around. Apparently, The Times checked nothing and everyone else used The Times as the source. Have corrections been made as of yet?

[Ken Tanaka]

Quite a story...and quite a character!

I'd say that this guy had the last laugh on many organizations. Sadly, I doubt that very many people give a rat's hams about who took these "Joe O'Donnell" images, or any photos at all. Now thanks to Marianne Fulton the handful that read this story are much more likely to remember Joe O'Donnell's name than Stan Stearns or Frank Gatteri.

Some stories are more constructively conveyed silently. This is one.

[Jernej]

The guy had balls, you gotta appreciate that ;)

[J London]

Its pretty sad to think this could happen in a visual world where photographers, artists, news-gatherers, editors etc etc are supposed to be aware of news and historical moments. The assumption is the media is not so hot as it likes to think and is obviously sadly lacking on research and establishing the truth as we would like to know it.

And if 'lifting' goes on at this level what chance for those posting on the web!

[John Haugaard]

Fulton mentions the bottom of "O'Donnell's" John Jr. salute photo has been strangely cropped. Try as I might, I can't reconcile the two photos as cropped. Take a look at the relationship between John Jr.'s shoes and the left shoe of Jackie. Draw a line on the Stearns photo where the O'Donnell photo as been cropped. You should see the same portion of her left shoe.

Anyway, just curious.

[Stan Banos]

Analogue Skullduggery Rocks!!!

[Lasse]

Sorry John, but the photos look the same to me. I cropped the Stearns photo in photoshop and you can see the same portion of her shoe.

[John Haugaard]

Lasse - yup, you're right. Shows the value of using the right tools. Thanks for the follow up.

[gary haynes]

Ken Tanaka seems to miss the point. As a photographer himself, he ought to understand the pride we all have in our work even though, working for UPI, we were anonymous. But while some of our well-known images made decades ago may appear without our names under them -- until the early 1990s," UPI" and after that, just "Bettman/Corbis" they are still OUR PICTURES. We get testy when we see photos we took with someone else's name under them not because the publication made an error, but because a THIEF is trying to take credit for taking photographs made by someone else. Those people are THIEVES. In O'Donnell's case, he even copyrighted the photos he didn't make.

[francesca]

hello this is my favourite photo I didn't know there where two photographer who took that photo I have the same taken from two angles and I haven't notice the position of the feet but a very good shoot