A fake Photo that earned global kudos

Kathmandu – Kittiya Pawlowski, deactivated her Instagram account where she had claimed to have donated USD 787.50 to the Snow Leopard Trust on November 25.

Kittiya came into the spotlight of nature lover across the world when she claimed that She was able to capture with her camera the rare snow leopard photos in the Mt. Everest region. Her claim was rubbished by the Alpine mag which published an investigative story saying her photos are not real but ‘collage’ work.

Fact-checking-research have reached similar conclusions. They say that the snow leopard Photos allegedly shot at 5,000-m altitude in the Mt. Everest region and claimed as real by Pawlowski are ‘fake’.

French and English-language Alpine mag has published material after fact-check from various aspects of photos by researchers with expertise in the field, with inference that Pawlowski claim was not true.

According to Alpine mag’s reporting, three of Pawlowski photos are demonstrably fake (collage of several fragments of photos). Snow leopard specialist Vincent Munier said to Alpine mag, ”the leopard was shown in an improbable location.”

Alpine mag reports, ”Pawlowski’s photos are superb, but they are creations, compositions of several images combined into one using software such as Photoshop.” In that story, Vincent Munier, a photographer who has tracked snow leopards for many years, said, ”I’ve got nothing against this type of creation, but it has to be presented as such.”

It is mentioned in Alpine mag’s report that Pawlowski didn’t provide it even though they asked for the actual photo for fact-checking. The report says, ”Several points remain unclear. Unless ‘Kittiya Pawlowski’ explains her work openly, more work is needed to determine:
1. Where did the pictures of the snow leopard come from?
2. Does Kittiya Pawlowski, whose Instagram pseudonym is the evocative ‘Girl_creature’, really exist?
3. More difficult: where do the pieces of the picture showing the sitting panther (not reproduced here) come from? Moraine in the foreground cracked glacier in the second, and in the middle, still, this panther which must have been borrowed somewhere….”

Kittyia posted content on her Instagram claiming to support the Snow Leopard Trust by selling pictures of snow leopards. According to her, on November 25, 787.50 USD was awarded to the trust.