Monsieur Genion is working in his underwear today, at least that's what he says on the phone. And because he's not the kind of man to put on pretences just because he is expecting visitors, we indeed find him sitting bare-legged at his desk in Charleroi, an hour's drive south of Brussels. Philippe Genion says he has learned to respect his body, and that he expects others to do so as well.

His T-shirt is stretched across his belly as though he has swallowed a small moon by mistake. The 52-year-old ascribes the prodigious circumference of his middle to poor metabolism, saying that he eats a healthy, balanced diet and also goes swimming regularly. Surrounding him are hundreds of bottles of wine on shelves reaching right up to the ceiling. They are from the best cellars in France, Austria, Australia and Germany. Because of his weight, standing is difficult for him, Genion continues. "Which is why I sat down for the photo. Otherwise, it would have taken far too long for me."

The photo. Genion is one of 10 subjects for which Italian photographer Giovanni Troilo won the World Press Photo Award in February. Troilo, as he himself explained, wanted to use images of Charleroi and its residents to depict the decay of Europe. But at the beginning of March, the jury decided to revoke the prize because of rules violations and deception. For one, a photo of a couple having sex in a car included the photographer's cousin and was posed, and an additional image was not taken in Charleroi at all, but in Brussels. The case retriggered a long-standing debate among photographers: To what degree is one allowed to bend reality? The discussion surrounding Charleroi has touched a sensitive nerve: the credibility of images.

"I have nothing against Charleroi"
With the revocation of the renowned World Press Photo Award, Giovanni Troilo's photos have triggered a broad debate about the relationship between images and reality. The photographer has defended his approach to the photo essay as a "consolidation of reality." For SPIEGEL, the photographer has annotated his photos from the Belgian city.

In the picture that Troilo took of Genion, the latter is sitting bare-chested in bluish light, his gaze directed downward. He looks like a sad, aging bear waiting to die in his cave in the light of a television set. "Philippe spends most of his time in his beautiful house in one of the most dangerous quarters of Charleroi," the photographer wrote in the text accompanying the photo. The subtext was clear: a poor, sick fatso on welfare.

Genion has worn many hats in his life. He has been a newspaper columnist, a musician and a restaurant tester for Gault Millau, the influential French restaurant guide. He sold pyrotechnics and fireworks, managed the electronic music band Front 242 and wrote a book called "Inventaire des Petits Plaisirs Belges," which roughly translates to "Inventory of Small Belgian Pleasures." He does not, despite how he looks in the photo, suffer from depression. He says that life is much too short for that. At some point, he began to take an interest in wine and has now become the general secretary of the Belgian guild of sommeliers. Genion is not exactly someone who accurately represents the internal decay of Europe.

Genion was born in Charleroi and grew up in the shadow of mineshaft towers and blast furnaces. In the mid-1980s, he and his partner bought a cheap house in a quiet side street with crumbling walls and carpets smelling of cat urine -- and immediately began renovating it. For the last year and a half, he has used some of the rooms of his house for an exclusive wine bar. Indeed, Genion is more symbolic of a city eager to reinvent itself.

Charleroi is not particularly attractive. It is a mid-sized city whose center is crisscrossed by arterials and bridges and it is dominated by the gray colossus of the Thy-Marcinelle Steelworks, which lies in the heart of the city like a sleeping monster. Among the prominent personalities to have called the city home is the serial killer and child molester Marc Dutroux, who lived here before his arrest. But the city also has an airport and an industrial park that attracts biotech firms. On this warm spring day, inline skaters can be seen cruising through the city center and young people are sitting in the park. But Giovanni Troilo only saw what he wanted to see. On his website, he writes: "A perverse and sick sex, race hate, neurotic obesity and the abuse of psychiatric drugs seem to be the only cures being able to make this endemic uneasiness acceptable." At the end of February, the city's mayor wrote to the World Press Photo Award jury saying that Troilo's images were a "serious distortion."

In one photo, a tattooed man holds a pistol, meant as further proof for the abyss into which this Ville noir, this black city -- as Troilo named his series -- has sunk. "I have never seen a person here with a pistol. I've never even heard a shot fired," says Philippe Genion as he sips from a dry Chardonnay. He says he tried to reach the photographer in early March. "I wanted to know how I could defend his work." Genion believes the image of himself is a good one, but adds that it is, of course, "a work of fiction." For example, on the wall behind where Troilo took the photo of Genion, a large, framed painting normally hangs. But it isn't in the photo. Why? Genion says that they didn't take it down for the photo shoot and Troilo says he can't remember removing it either, but insists that he did not digitally alter the photograph.