The photographer clearly states in her website that all of her photos are edited in some way or another (see 'Disclaimer'):
https://kittiyapawlowski.com/about-kittiya
Providing the originals would also make it trivial to pass it through https://fotoforensics.com/ to carry out a more robust detection of doctoring of the images.
However, and importantly, she only added the disclaimer after having suffered from the backlash:
Check for yourself:
No statement about 'composites' on this version from 4 days ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221127010418/https://kittiyapa...
I am not convinced by her explanation either. It was never clear they were composites.
Again, going to her original publication: https://kittiyapawlowski.com/snow-leopard-series
I find the whole story misleading at best: having the 'composite' (fake) images next to captions explaining that this is a snow leopard at 17,014 ft (5185 meters) is dishonest.
She thought she could get away with it but backtracked a few days later after it got out of hands.
We don't know when this first disclaimer was orignially published / added though.
And I would let people make their own decision whether they think her publication is misleading or not:
https://kittiyapawlowski.com/snow-leopard-series
edit: her disclaimer also reads like it was more reactive rather than precautionary: "I never stated my images were not edited anywhere".
Does she deserve death threats? It is responsible to post a "debunking" article without actually reaching out to the artist to ask?
I consider the "journalists" who wrote this article to be far more lacking in ethics than the artist who posted these photos.
It does not contain that disclaimer. So, unless it was moved from another part of the website, there was no disclaimer before the article was published.
Nevertheless, on https://kittiyapawlowski.com/snow-leopard-series there is no mention whatsoever that images are fake collages.
Images are highly misleading, no actual snow leopards are in places like this.
Also, even disclaimer is misleading and not making clear that many images are heavily faked. Not just colour balanced but altogether merge of multiple different photos.
That is just lying from side of that artist ("photographer" is misleading here).
At the same time she tries to appear as if she is some celebrated artist (mentioned by National Geographic etc.)
She seems to be have chosen ambiguity as her mode of communication which is troublesome.
Note also https://web.archive.org/web/20221127122923mp_/https://kittiy... selling fake collages as "Photography by Kittiya Pawlowski"
Footer has also
> Member of the World Photography Organization since 2016
and
> Help fund Kittiya's next photography expedition to Antarctica
But the earliest entry for the contact page (27th November) is the same as right now: https://web.archive.org/web/20221127010417/https://kittiyapa...
So it's unclear when the disclaimer was added.
https://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=282efc0801ef0a8a50...
The results are for you to judge.
In other words, it's mostly only good for detecting if a JPEG (with compression artefacts) was edited and saved to another JPEG, although even then you can work around it to some degree by saving at similar chroma and compression qualities if you know what you're doing.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221101125244/https://kittiyapa...
>Squinting through my camera’s telephoto lens, I noticed something in the shadow of Mount Pumori. At first I thought it was a rock, but it was exactly what I was looking for.
In that way her description would still reflect reality. Or are you claiming she didn’t photograph a snow leopard?
I am claiming that her descriptions are at least highly misleading and apparently formed to technically avoid stating false info, while lying.
The only relevant question you have to ask yourself is whether she (herself) presented herself as a journalist. If not then this is all a bit weird to accuse her of anything.
Obviously artists can use photo montages. And obviously artists don't even have to disclose that anywhere. The art can stand for itself.
After reading the article, which was pretty blunt, I was trying to figure out whether she had been forced to add a disclaimer of sorts (because had that been there initially, I would have assumed it would have been mentioned in the article). I guess her work went 'viral' and now people are accusing her of being dishonest in a way that (again, I assume!) she (most likely!) didn't set out to be.
At least that was my take. I could be completely wrong and she could have set out to manipulate the entire world - but I'd prefer to give her the benefit of the doubt. Hanlon's razor and all that :-)
Naively looking at what you see there and taking it for gospel very likely leads to both false positives and negatives. I think the assumption that you can just take any image, upload it to fotoforensics.com and know whether it's fake is dangerous.
So this controversy is silly. There is no lie to expose.