Just whose images is this?

This little girl’s photo is mine not Steve McCurry’s.

Every once in a while it’s always a good idea to Google your name. It’s a good way to find out what people are saying about you and to check out any links people might have made to your website. So a few days ago I Googled “Matt Brandon”. Of course many of my photos came up. For fun I tried out Google’s image search function. It is simple to use. Take any image under the image tab of the Google search you just performed and drag it to the search bar. It will then search for that image within the Google database. It’s quite amazing and I find it much more accurate than Tin Eye. When the image above appeared I drug it to the search bar and found four pages of results. I was a little surprised to see so many pages. I have not used the image that much on the Internet. Of course there was several links to my blog and to other blogs that have interviewed me. I expected these. Then I saw a couple of results with Steve McCurry’s name under them. I found this to be odd. After clicking a few of the links I realized some bloggers have somehow confused my image of the little Gujjar girl with a Steve McCurry image. In fact there were no less than nine websites that listed this image as belonging to Steve McCurry. Honestly, I don’t know whether to be flattered or furious.

There’s not a photographer on earth who takes the kind of images that I do that would not be flattered to have one of their images mistaken as a Steve McCurry shot. Steve McCurry set the bar for travel and cultural photography years ago. Interestingly enough I find it rather amusing that one of my images could be confused with one of his. McCurry has a definite style. Often, though not always, he photographs children from slightly above and usually with a very shallow depth of field. Very few if any of his images of children are smiling . They all seem to have a very somber look on there face. This is almost the complete opposite of this image. To be fair, I’m sure McCurry takes many other photos of children that are smiling and are not shot from above. But, this image is different enough that would make me wonder how people would view it unquestionably as a Steve McCurry image.

My Gujjar girl is in good company.

So, how did this confusion begin? I think a clue is that most, though not all, of these websites are either Spanish or Italian. So, the bloggers may not speak or read English. I have a feeling that they simply did a search for Steve McCurry as I did Matt Brandon and found several images and assumed they were his. Then just pulled a copy off the site and used it in their blog post on McCurry. Why would my image be listed in a Steve McCurry search? I can only assume it has to do with an old post I did back in 2008 called, “Steve McCurry Sharp“. In this post I comment about how I viewed several McCurry images at a gallery and how they seemed “soft”.  I used this to point out that just because a digital image is soft it should not be tossed out if it conveys emotion. Here is the catch, I used the same photo that is showing up in the searches as my example of a super sharp image. Could this be the reason? Whatever the reason – it brings up two points I want to touch on briefly.

The first one is, bloggers need to be more careful when blogging. Come on! How hard is it to check your facts? Not only does this image not appear anywhere on McCurry’s own website it’s file name has my name on it. Doesn’t it strike you odd that though it is a good photo it is stylistically very different from the rest of McCurry’s work? Spend more than a few seconds gathering your information and really do some research.

The second thing is a lesson learned. Where it is true the file had my name on it, it did not have my full name on it. Recently I have started a new naming convention. My file names now read “matt_brandon_place_year.month.day.jpg” Here is an example: “matt_brandon_kashmir_2004.05.31.jpg” One thing I did do right was I embed my image with my name and other copyright information. Interestingly enough every photo of mine used on each of these blogs about Steve McCurry had my name embedded in them identifying me as the photographer. I always embed my name and copyright information in every photo. This is never a guarantee that it will remain in the photo. But it might, as with these photos, at least help.

In closing, after I sent an email to one of these websites asking them to remove the photo, they responded with:

Hello Matt! First of all I ask you apologize for the error. Second: If we made this error means you are a good photographer. Do you have a website or can you send us some of your best shots and information about you. We are happy to introduce you in our 5election magazine. Thanking you in advance and sorry again for our error.

Wishing you all the best regards from Italy,

Florian ( www.5election.com )

Ciao!

Editors Note: I just received a Facebook message from Kristian Bertel he writes, “Hi again Matt, I noticed in your blog post that you use file naming with an underscore. Google robots as far as I know do not see underscore _ as a space so it is best with matt-brandon-tokyo-japan.” Great pieces of information that effects this post. Please make not of this and Thanks Kristian!