Borrowing eyes

They remind us often in school not to copy other people’s work. It’s not so much to encourage you to do your job and come up with original work, but to instill values.

Fifty-five-year-old Dodjie Marquez remembers that fateful August weekend, when he received a call from the organizers of the Smiles for the World photo competition, asking him to fly to Manila for an interview. He had made it to the top seven. Dodjie, who started taking photos in the ‘70s using a borrowed Kodak brownie box camera, couldn’t even believe he had made it to the top. “You know, the one with flash cubes,” describes Dodjie of his first camera. “If you don’t know what on earth that is, then you must be very young!”

Dodjie flew to Manila from Bacolod City. Back at home, he operates a hauling business and occasionally works with the Negros Museum, teaching young children to draw and write. The interview process for the competition was just one more step before the judges could decide who the finalists were. While it was mainly a photo contest, Dodjie assumes the organizers were also looking for something more, someone who could play the role of the ambassador for the vision of Smiles for the World, someone with a true understanding of calidad humana, or pure human compassion.

Dodjie was fifth out of the seven finalists in the holding lobby of the Lopez Museum in Manila, ready to face a panel of judges composed of names from the academe, the business sector and diplomacy: the organizer and ambassador Roberto Mayoga, Oscar Lopez and Antonio Torralba of UA&P. While waiting, Dodjie chatted up the young boy who sat beside him, the seventh and last to be interviewed for the day. A slim young man dressed all in black with a matching backpack, he explained that he had run late because he had to travel all the way from Las Piñas. Dodjie kept to himself the fact that his trip, all the way from Negros, was much more arduous. The boy’s name was Mark Solis. After the interview, Mark would be awarded first place with his portrait of a young boy from Zamboanga, helping his dad harvest seaweed. Mark’s essay would explain that their home had been struck by a typhoon. Dodjie would take second place.

The awarding ceremony would commence on Sept. 18 at the CCP complex, an event to recognize the top three finalists, and the stories that they shared with their photos. In attendance were some society names, other international ambassadors and the media. For photojournalist Hannah Reyes, 22, even placing in the competition at all came as quite a surprise. Hannah came in third for her portrait of a smiling tattooed woman from the Butbut tribe. When she met the champion, Mark Solis, that night, she formed an instant bond with him. They were both peers, and graduates from the University of the Philippines. Mark struck Hannah as incredibly impressionable, especially in conversing with the high-profile guests of that evening. For Dodjie, who had come to the event with his two daughters that night, Mark seemed to be the perfect ambassador to speak about calidad humana, an admirable figure to young people all over the world.

After the organizers awarded Mark his prize, US$1,000 and a trip to Brazil and Chile, Mark was invited to give a short speech to the crowd. Here, he proved his eloquence. Hannah, who noticed that he had left his speech notes on his chair, was amazed at his confidence, as impromptu as the speech might have been.

But less than a week later, a man named Gregory John Smith, a social entrepreneur associated with the Children At Risk Foundation, claimed that the winning photo of the smiling boy with seaweed was actually his — taken at a seaside town in Brazil, not in Zamboanga, and way back in 2006, by Smith himself. The deception by the boy went viral, and Mark confessed later that day with a public apology letter.

“I was shocked and couldn’t believe it at first, but when I read and evaluated all the issues, I was convinced that Mark had indeed committed the ‘mortal sin’ of plagiarism,” says Dodjie. “He was one of those kids you meet in UP and you just know they’re gifted,” says Hannah. “Thinking back on it now, it must have been painful for him to have given that speech and gotten all the media attention.”

As case of plagiarism, maybe it could be dismissed as youthful recklessness. Living in the age of technology, plagiarism is easy. The Internet has become a platform for creative work and content that can easily be yours via copy and paste.

But Mark wasn’t a lazy student trying to meet a school paper deadline. He was a scholar of numerous organizations, a student ambassador, and one whose academic papers had been presented in international conferences. This wasn’t the classic case of lazy youth plagiarism. This was something different: temptation and greed had gotten the best of his brilliance. Especially upon learning that this incident was not his first, but what would be the last in a string of stolen photos he had used to win different photo competitions. Like a swift heist, he had taken photos from different photographers on Flickr, and passed them off as his own. It’s a sinking-heart feeling you can’t shrug off — hard to swallow, knowing that someone as promising and bright as Mark will have to face this mistake, maybe for the rest of his life. His future, once glowing, now is uncomfortably uncertain.

They remind us often in school not to copy other people’s work. It’s not so much to encourage you to do your job and come up with original work, but also to instill certain values. Plagiarism is more than just lifting words and pictures of other people and using it as our own; it is actually disrespect for everyone involved, and disrespect for the passion of the art itself. It’s a foolish temptation that tells a lot more about a person’s motives and values, more than just a case of copycatting.