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While impersonation may be a type of adulation, unoriginality is just taking and it can’t go on without serious consequences. Grant winning picture taker Souvid Datta has been blamed for taking from another acclaimed picture taker, Mary Ellen Mark, and the proof is overpowering.

As Shreya Bhat of Bangalore, India, has pointed out, there is something off and unnatural in one of Datta’s shots from his series “In the Shadows of Kolkata”, depicting the cycle of sexual violence among adults and children in Sonagachi, Kolkata, India (which is one of the largest red light districts in all South Asia).

This is the thing that Datta composed when he transferred the photograph to Scribbler: “Radhika, 17, in the room of a veteran sex laborer, Asma, in Sonagachi (included dressing in foundation). The two have developed close over Radhika’s period here; she regards and gains from Asma’s involvement and matter of actuality, survival mentality, while Asma feels an affection for Radhika’s free ‘graciousness, interest’ and purity. Solid bonds can regularly shape inside houses of ill-repute as young ladies figure out how to bolster each other and get self-strengthening through gathering statement and aggregate involvement.”

“Something was abnormal and it genuinely did not take me long to assume that a piece of the picture had been Photoshopped out of Mary Ellen Mark’s work,” Bhat tells PetaPixel. “You can see with your own eyes how conveniently (or not) he has figured out how to pick the woman in the setting off Mary’s incredible work and asserted it as his very own piece creation.”

After the news opened up to the world, Souvid Datta has brought down his site, Facebook, and Twitter. Amid the most recent few years, he has won the PDN 30, the Pulitzer Center Grant, Getty Grant for Editorial Photography, Magnum Photos 30 Under 30 Award, and different rivalries. He ought to feel awful to steal, as well as for that appalling Photoshop work also.

petapixel

Do these images look alike to you?

Photographer Souvid Datta has won numerous photography competitions, but now he’s caught up in a plagiarism scandal because of this picture

Souvid Datta

It bears more than a striking resemblance to a shot of Indian transvestites taken by legendary photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark in 1978

Mary Ellen Mark

Here’s a side by side comparison, left image flipped</h2

Datta claimed that the person in the background is “a veteran sex worker, Asma”

Here’s a comparison with Datta’s photo flipped horizontally and auto-aligned with Mark’s in Photoshop, opacity at 50 percent

It does look pretty similar, huh?

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