The Sunday Submission № 04 — Your Photograph Is Now Guilty Until Proven Innocent
You can win a major photography competition and still be ordered, weeks later, to prove your photograph is what you say it is. Contests now reserve the right to demand your RAW file, and a growing number ban AI outright — so the same image can be a clean entry at one and a disqualification waiting to happen at the next. For a hundred and eighty years a photograph was believed by default. That contract has quietly reversed: your photograph is now presumed guilty until you prove it innocent, and it is the honest photographer who pays. What that costs you, what each contest is really asking when it asks for your file, and how to know — before you pay — exactly what you will be made to prove.