Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2010: “No captive animals allowed"

Mark Carwardine, head of the Wildife Photographer of the Year judging panel, gives PhotoRadar the real story about the disqualification of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner, the potential problems for the 2010 competition and Mark's thoughts about the use of captive animals in wildlife photography.

We were getting emails from various photographers saying “I know that wolf”. That was the real alarm bell and that’s what got us going.

PR: What was it led you to reconvene the judging panel to discuss the winning image, Storybook Wolf by Jose Luis Rodriguez?
Mark: We’d sort of been aware of there being a potential problem, sometime in the second half of October and we started investigating then. We were aware of various discussions, particularly on Spanish photographers' websites.

We were getting emails from various photographers saying “I know that wolf”. That was the real alarm bell and that’s what got us going. They recognised him from this place, Canada Real, a zoological park, in Madrid.

One of the photographers on the judging panel, Jim Brandenburg has been photographing and studying wild wolves for 45 years and knows wolves inside out. He and other wolf experts looked at the animal in the winning picture and then compared it with pictures of a wolf called Ossian in Canada Real. They concluded that it’s the same wolf – there are some quite distinctive markings.

Did you have any suspicions when you were judging?
Not at all, when we’re judging. It’s judged blind, so you basically have a room with all the judges in with the staff from the competition behind, the judges have no idea who the photographers are, we just see the photographs.

If we’re interested, and particularly when we get towards the final selection, we ask the staff to read out the final selections and we still don’t know who the photographer is, or anymore about it.

With all the winning images we do ask to hear the captions. So we did hear the wolf one, and we were just impressed because the description said it was a wild Iberian wolf. We thought ‘wow – what an amazing achievement’. At the time, we have to take what the photographers say as the truth.

How hard was it to come to the decision in the end?
It was hard because we wanted to be absolutely sure.  It’s taken several months of consultation with lots of different people. I haven’t actually been directly involved with all of that, the Natural History Museum and BBC Worldwide have been doing all that. We’ve been collating evidence – written evidence from wolf experts and photographic evidence.

Jose Luis Rodriguez has been banned from ever entering the competition again.

One of the other key things, if you look behind the wolf in the winning picture, is that there’s a very distinctive bent tree. We’ve got photographs of the same bent tree in Canada Real.

This sort of research does take a long time, but we also wanted to give the photographer, Jose Luis Rodriguez the chance to prove that it really was a wild wolf. There was a lot of correspondence with him and because of the language difficulties and him being out in the field a lot, that also took time.

Have you spoken to Jose yourself?
No I haven’t, it’s all been by email, with the Natural History Museum, and he’s still saying that it’s a wild wolf.

Do you think there will be any knock-on effects for the 2010 competition?
Obviously it’s very sad that it’s happened, but I’m a great believer in things having a positive outcome. On the negative side of course there is now no winner, for the first time in 46 years, and it’s a great shame that somebody has actually hoodwinked us and caused all these problems. It’s a terrible thing to have happened, but on the positive, what it is doing is getting people talking about honesty and wildlife photography.

In advertising photography for example, it’s not a problem, you can Photoshop all you like and everyone accepts that and expects it. With wildlife photography, and certainly with the Photographer of the Year competition, we’re trying to encourage people to be honest with the images. We don’t allow any manipulation, and ask photographers to caption honestly.

There’s nothing wrong with photographing a captive animal per se, but you should declare it and I feel very strongly about this. Every photographer should declare exactly how the image was taken in this respect. Of course the big issue with this, is not so much that it’s a captive animal, but that it’s a model that was actually trained for photographers, and again that’s against all the rules.

So I think the positive from it is I think it’ll actually encourage people to be more honest because they’ll see the repercussions of not being honest. Certainly from the photographers I’ve spoken to at various events and so on, most are astonished that somebody could do this, and very sympathetic towards the competition. Personally I think we’ll probably get more entries than we did last year and it’s certainly given the competition a higher profile. I’m a great believer in these things turning around.

From the 2010 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition onwards, we’re banning shots of captive animals altogether...

Are you making any changes to the 2010 competition?
Yes, we've decided to ban captive animals from the competition altogether. That's something we've been considering for a number of years. We've also introduced a new special award, called Wildlife Photojournalist of the Year.

Have you made any plans to police the 2010 competition harder?
To be honest, I think we're doing all we can. We have a first-class team of expert judges, most of whom change each year, and we invest a huge amount of time in the judging process to give every photograph careful consideration. I think it's very important to continue judging blind - in other words, without knowing the names of the photographers - in order to make it as fair and unbiased as possible. The rules are published in all sorts of different languages, including Spanish, Jose's first language, so this shouldn't leave any room for doubt. And we check the captions if we have any doubts or queries about any given picture. Beyond that, with more than 43,000 entries last year alone, we simply have to take every photographers' word for it. 99.9% of all the photographers entering the competition are completely honest and truthful, of course. For the remaining 0.1%, the fact that Jose Luis Rodriguez has been banned from ever entering the competition again simply shows how strongly we feel about the matter.

For more Veolia Environnement Photographer of the Year related stories click the following:
Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner disqualified
Veolia Environnement Photographer of the Year winners
Interview with winner, Jose Luis Rodriguez
Interview with Mark Carwardine, head judge
Interview with Fergus Gill, winner of Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year