Time magazine's powerful "Sex for Sale" June 21 cover story included a series of photos on child prostitution in Moscow that has embroiled the magazine in a dispute about their authenticity. Shot by seventeen-year-old Russian photographer Alexey Ostrovskiy, the "exclusive series of photographs," in Time's words, "documents the lives" of two prepubescent boys, Dima and Marik, who allegedly sell their bodies outside the Bolshoi Theater with the help of their pimp, Sasha.

Some Western photographers in Moscow say they believe Time bought photos that were staged by a Russian photographer with an unsavory reputation. Richard Ellis, Moscow photo editor for Reuters news service, made the allegations public when he wrote a bulletin board comment on CompuServe's journalism forum. The story, he charged, was "a set-up, faked by the photographer, who duped the reporter into believing him." Kurt Foss, who was serving as a systems operator on the National Press Photographers Association's section of the forum that day, responded that he didn't "quite see how any photo editor with any experience could not see that those were contrived. Very stilted." Time, which launched an investigation, denies the allegation, although it concedes it may never have proof of the photos' authenticity. "We have no way of proving one way or another whether these photos are false or true," says Joelle Attinger, deputy chief of correspondents.

The issues raised are critical ones for journalists in Moscow, where, under the old regime, setting up a photo to illustrate an idea was standard operating procedure and where, since the demise of the Soviet system, entrepreneurs, responding to the Western press's demand for feature stories, have revived an old racket: selling bogus photographs and video material for big bucks to foreign media organizations. "Twenty years ago everybody was lying, saying nothing happened, and now everyone is lying, saying everything is happening," says Jean-Yves Huchet, a reporter with the French-German television network Arte. "If you want to find a guy who found Yeltsin and Gorbachev kissing on Red Square, it's no problem."

Examples date from the beginning of perestroika. After the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, some Western networks aired stringer footage purporting to show the nuclear reactor; the "reactor" turned out to be an Italian shoe factory. Two years later, at the time of the devastating earthquake in Armenia, a U.S. network was offered footage of buildings collapsing in Leninakan, which turned out to show the routine demolition of buildings deemed structurally unsound. John Mondello, a CBS News editor, says he questions most stringer footage from far-flung former Soviet hot spots: "There's a little guy with a little camera following a squad of fighters in you-name-the-southern-republic, and it all looks like it's directed by the same guy," he says.

In the Time case, several inconsistencies cast some doubt on Time's facts. The article says eight-year-old Marik was "cast into the street" after communism collapsed, sold to Sasha for vodka, and forced to sell himself for "food and a place to live." But Marik and his mother, taxi dispatcher Galina Zel, told this reporter that he is eleven, lives at home, and was never sold to anyone for anything. In two interviews with this reporter and a third with another, Marik, the younger of the two boys in the photos, said he was paid to pose for them. Even the photographer in question -- Ostrovskiy -- says Time erred in one photo caption, which depicts Marik "on the lap of a client before leaving with him." Ostrovskiy says the man shown did not procure Marik or leave with him after the photos were shot.

Time says its reporting was thorough. Editors first saw one of Ostrovskiy's photos on the Agence France-Presse wire, then decided to buy the rest of his shots and pursue the story they depicted. Reporter Ann M. Simmons did not interview Marik or Dima before the photos were printed, Attinger says, but before interviewing Sasha she talked with five "totally independent people" who confirmed that he is a pimp. Simmons referred all questions to the magazine's New York headquarters, where Time spokesman Robert Pondiscio says the reporter investigated the backgrounds of all three subjects. After the photos were printed and the controversy erupted, Attinger says, Marik told Time that he was indeed a prostitute, that he worked for Sasha two or three days a week, and that he had been told by his pimp to lie about it. One of the unpublished photos, she notes, shows Dima about to perform fellatio

Here the story gets even murkier. Attinger claims that Ellis, along with his translator and a free-lance photographer, "had a conversation with Sasha" in which "Sasha is told that there is money to be made if he and the boys say the pictures are fake." Ellis, who says employees of Time's Moscow office read excerpts from a transcript of the conversation to him and a superior at Reuters, insists that Time's implication -- that Sasha was urged to lie -- is false. In an August 16 editorial bringing readers up to date on the controversy, Time's managing editor, James R. Gaines, reports that Sasha had secretly taped the conversation and he cites several passages from the transcript.

Meanwhile, three journalists in Moscow say they rejected Ostrovskiy's work before the Time controversy erupted. Hutchet, of Arte, who also does free-lance work, says he bought the child-prostitution photos but decided not to use them because he doubted their authenticity. Sygma photographer Georges De Keerle says he rejected two separate series of Ostrovskiy photos, one of female prostitutes, one of males, because they looked "obviously" set up. And Baburam Prabhu, a cameraman for BBC TV News in Moscow, says that in April he refused material on child prostitution shot by Ostrovskiy on the ground that it appeared staged.

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