The Press: Keen Keen

James Keen, 26-year-old photographer for the Associated Press, has a reputation for always striving for the unusual. Assigned to cover the Ohio-Mississippi flood last January, he spied a refugee Arkansas mother suckling her baby in a relief station, took a human interest picture called “Lowland Madonna” which won him wide praise and Editor & Publisher honors. Three weeks ago Photographer Keen was rushed to Warren County, Ga., whose farmers complained that Glascock County cotton growers were wooing away their Negro cotton pickers with higher wages and whiskey. Warren County Sheriff G. P. Hogan had acknowledged that some Warren County folk had “fired guns into the air” to discourage the Glascock raiders. This looked like a good folksy picture story to Photographer Keen, who proceeded to play it for what it was worth — and a little extra.

Unable to find a gun-toting Warren County farmer guarding his blackamoors when he got there, keen James Keen sim ply persuaded a visitor from Atlanta to put on a shabby shirt and pants, shoulder a musket, go out in a field and pose near some Negro pickers. When Sheriff Hogan saw the Keen photograph in his paper, he resented the implication that Warren County was holding its blacks in peonage. He set out to arrest the man with the gun. No one could identify him, so Sheriff Hogan challenged the AP to prove the picture was taken in Warren County.

Realistic AP General Manager Kent Cooper understands that many photo graphs cannot be spontaneous, but upon investigating the situation through the AP’s promising 26-year-old Atlanta Photo Editor William Boring he quickly de cided that initiative had o’erleaped itself. Last week he fired both Messrs. Boring and Keen. Apologetically AP members told their readers : “Investigation revealed the picture was not genuine, but was a picture posed by the photographer, conveyed a false impression, and did not truthfully represent conditions.”