Blade Editor: Detrich Submitted 79 Altered Photos This Year

Blade Editor: Detrich Submitted 79 Altered Photos This Year

April 15, 2007
By Daryl Lang (PDN)

The Toledo Blade now says it unknowingly published dozens of digitally manipulated images submitted by staff photographer Allan Detrich.

An internal investigation found that Detrich, who resigned April 7, submitted 79 images this year that had been altered, Blade vice president and executive editor Ron Royhab writes in the paper's Sunday edition.

The details in Royhab's column cast Detrich as a serial Photoshopper, crossing well-established ethical lines on a routine basis.

"The changes Mr. Detrich made included erasing people, tree limbs, utility poles, electrical wires, electrical outlets, and other background elements from photographs. In other cases, he added elements such as tree branches and shrubbery," Royhab writes. In two cases, Detrich added a basketball and a hockey puck to sports photos.

The development represents an extraordinary fall for Detrich, a 17-year veteran of the Blade who has won numerous awards and claimed in an April 5 interview, "I'm not a cloner, that's not something I would do."

Several photojournalists have lost their jobs in recent years over digital manipulation, but none has been accused of as many infractions as Detrich.

Blade director of photography Nate Parsons led a review of 947 photos Detrich had submitted for publication since January. Of those photos, 79 were altered. The Blade published 27 of those images in the newspaper and online, and an additional 31 online only. Twenty-one of the digitally altered photos were not published.

The Blade did not print a detailed breakdown of which photos were altered. In Sunday's paper, it published just two examples: an image of a hair salon in which a cord in the background had been erased, and a women's college basketball photo in which a basketball had been added to the shot. The salon photo originally ran online; the basketball photo was never published, the paper says.

Detrich's work came under scrutiny early this month, when photographers at other Ohio newspapers noticed a suspicious inconsistency in one of his front-page photos. In a photo of the Bluffton University baseball team, Detrich erased a pair of legs that were protruding from behind a banner in the background. Other photographers shot nearly identical images that showed the legs. The Blade says it first became aware of the suspicious image when a reporter from the National Press Photographers Association publication News Photographer contacted them.

Detrich admitted altering the Bluffton photograph but said he did so for personal use and submitted the altered image to his editors by mistake. The paper suspended Detrich and began investigating his work, and Detrich resigned soon after.

The Blade and The Associated Press have already blocked access to Detrich's work in their archives, and the Blade says it also will remove all of Detrich's work from toledoblade.com.

The Blade only examined Detrich's work since January. The review apparently did not survey his earlier work, including photos last year that won Detrich three first-place awards from the Cleveland Press Club and two honorable mentions from the Ohio News Photographers Association.

Detrich has been working for the Blade since 1989 and was a finalist for a 1998 Pulitzer Prize in feature photography. In 1994 the Ohio News Photographers Association named him Photographer of the Year.

Detrich declined to comment Sunday. In a brief phone interview April 9, Detrich said little about the upcoming Blade investigation. "I don't know what they're going to find. I've put that behind me," he said. Detrich is planning to start a weather disaster training service with two friends, a company called www.DisasterWeatherTraining.com, according to his blog.

Royhab's Sunday column, which ran on page B1, apologizes to readers and says all Blade photojournalists must adhere to the National Press Photographers Association's Digital Manipulation Code of Ethics.

"It's impossible to make sense of why this happened, and we are embarrassed by it. But it is important that we are up front and honest with our readers," Royhab writes. "Mr. Detrich joined The Blade in 1989 and has won hundreds of newspaper photography awards over the years. He was a Pulitzer finalist in 1998. The work he turned in always appeared to be quality photojournalism, which is why editors had no reason to suspect he was digitally altering photographs. In this respect, we let our readers down, and we apologize for that and pledge to you that we will do better."