By Donald R. Winslow
© 2007 News Photographer magazine
TOLEDO, OH (April 5, 2007) – New questions about news photo manipulation have come up after a high-profile Ohio sporting event that drew multiple photojournalists from large regional daily newspapers on Friday. When pictures by several photojournalists were published prominently on Saturday’s front pages, it was clear that one of the images differed significantly from the others, raising questions about whether the photograph had been digitally altered.
Late today one of the editors of the Toledo Blade confirmed what many had suspected, that a published picture by staff photographer Allan Detrich had indeed been digitally changed.
“The photograph was, in fact, altered,” Blade assistant managing editor for administration Luann Sharp told News Photographer magazine today. She issued a statement on behalf of the newspaper:
This allegation was brought to our attention by NPPA late Wednesday night. The Blade’s preliminary investigation confirms that the photo of the Bluffton baseball team published on page A-1 March 31, was digitally altered before it was submitted to the newspaper for publication. It was one of 16 photos turned in and it was the only one that was altered prior to being sent to the photo desk.
The photographer’s explanation is that he altered the photo for his personal files and inadvertently transmitted the wrong picture for publication. The Blade takes such matters very seriously and we are continuing our internal investigation. We also will notify our readers that an altered photograph was published.
Sharp said that at this time it appears that no one else at the Blade was involved in changing the image, and that no disciplinary action has been taken because the investigation is still ongoing. “We still have to examine discs, and to see what time files were sent it, so it is still ongoing,” she said.
Detrich's altered photograph was also published in the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
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It’s a story that started last Friday and unfolded over the last few days as Ohio photojournalists talked about the difference between Detrich’s photograph and the images by other photographers from the same event.
In the right background of front page news photographs taken by other photojournalists working for three other newspapers, a pair of legs in blue jeans can be seen beneath a banner. But in Detrich’s photograph, the legs are not there. Only green grass.
Some wondered, did the person walk away for a moment, or were the pant legs digitally removed from the scene?
Earlier today Detrich told News Photographer magazine that he didn't know what happened to the legs, and offered no other explanation. Later in the day, after meeting with Blade editors and having his laptop examined, the photographer told a very different story.
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As it turns out, the mystery legs belong to Ohio freelance photojournalist Madalyn Ruggiero who was shooting Friday for the Chicago Tribune. “I was standing there the entire time,” Ruggiero told News Photographer magazine today. “I did not move away. I was kneeling, and then I was standing, but I was there. I did not leave.”
The controversy started after Friday’s event, when the surviving members of Bluffton University’s baseball team returned to the diamond for their first game since they were involved in a deadly bus accident on March 2. The accident on Interstate 75 in Atlanta killed five of their teammates.
Before the start of Friday’s game, the baseball team gathered in a circle on the playing field near five banners that were hanging on an outfield fence. The banners bore the names and uniform numbers of each one of their five deceased teammates. The Bluffton team members removed their caps and dropped to one knee as they observed a moment of silence or prayer, with the banners forming the right-hand background in an extremely horizontal composition.
Many photographers made pictures of the moment, but at least four photojournalists were shooting from a remarkably similar angle. Pictures from these four ran large (five or six columns wide) as Saturday’s lead art on the front page of their newspapers: The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, the Dayton Daily News, The Lima News, and the Toledo Blade.
The photographers who had similar photographs published in a comparable and very prominent manner were Joshua Gunter of The Plain Dealer; Chris Stewart of the Dayton Daily News; Kelli Cardinal of The Lima News; and Detrich in the Blade.
On Monday, photographers at the Dayton Daily News noticed a discrepancy in the four front-page images. In Detrich’s photograph on the front of the Toledo Blade, the blue jean legs were missing.
“One of our staff photographers was poking around on a Web site on Monday that shows front pages,” Ron Rollins told News Photographer magazine today. He’s the managing editor for content for Cox Ohio Publishing, and he’s responsible for the sports, features, and photography departments at the Dayton Daily News. “It was a big story for Ohio and he wanted to see how various papers around the state handled it. It’s an odd situation to have nearly the same photo on several front pages on the same day, so he was poking around out of curiosity and he noticed what he thought he noticed, and it became a topic of conversation in the photo department.”
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As the week progressed, other photographers around Ohio were talking about the photograph as well. “I heard it was an AP photographer behind the banner,” Kelli Cardinal of The Lima News said, “because we were all wondering what the shot would have looked like from back there.”
Cardinal looked through her sequence of photographs from the event and said, “In a few of my photos, when they [the players] are starting to kneel down, the blue jean legs are also kneeling down, in the beginning. And then the person stood up, and they were there the whole time I was shooting. When the team was about to stand up, when the players were still kneeling but most of their heads are up and not down, and they’re almost standing up, the [blue jean] legs are still there.” Cardinal says that in every one of her photographs from the sequence, the blue jean legs are there behind the banner in some manner, either standing or kneeling.
As it turned out the legs were not those of an AP photographer, they were photographer Ruggiero’s legs.
Ohio freelancer J.D. Pooley was shooting the game for AP, and he’s the one who recognized the blue jean legs as those of Ruggiero, a freelancer based in the Toledo area who often shoots for the Detroit Free Press. Pooley transmitted a photograph on the AP wire of a groundskeeper raking the dirt around one of the bases with the banners in the background. It was taken about 10 minutes after the players quickly gathered, knelt down, and then dispersed. His picture clearly shows Ruggiero sitting on the ground behind the banners and looking out between two of them. Pooley’s picture of the scene ran large in The New York Times on Sunday.
Ruggiero is also certain that it was her legs behind the banner, as she was the only one in that position behind the fence. “I was there for the entire sequence, the only one there all by myself, I was standing there the entire time,” she told News Photographer magazine today.
Tribune editors told Ruggiero they wanted “something different.” “I was trying to get away from the pack of photographers, to get away and shoot something different, to get on the opposite side. I took a little walk, and then all of a sudden the players were coming up toward me. They were on their knees for a few quick moments, and I was kneeling at first and then I stood up and got about two frames. One was soft and the other one was sharp. It happened so fast, but I didn’t move away, I got two frames out of it. I was there the entire time. I was kneeling, then I stood up. I didn’t leave from there until the game was about to start.”
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Contacted early Thursday morning, five days after the pictures were published, Detrich told News Photographer magazine, “I don’t know what to say.” Asked this morning whether he had altered the photograph, he said that he had not – and that he didn’t know what could have happened to the image. When told that the photographer whose legs were visible behind the banner had been interviewed, and that she maintains that she did not leave that position, and that other photographers had examined their sequences of the event, and that the legs were visible for the entire time, he offered no response or explanation.
This morning Blade editors started an internal investigation into Detrich's photograph, and before noon they met with the photographer. They questioned Detrich about the image and the sequence of events and examined his laptop computer. Then Blade editors issued their statement saying the photograph had indeed been altered, and that their investigation continues.
Later in the day, after that meeting and the editors' statement, Detrich offered a different explanation, one that contradicts his statements of this morning. In an afternoon call to News Photographer magazine to “clarify some earlier points,” he now says that he made the altered photograph for himself and not for publication “I saw a beautiful picture and I made it for myself and I didn’t delete it from my ‘transmit’ folder. The altered photo and the original photo were in the transmit folder together. When it came time to transmit, the wrong picture was sent. It was a big mistake on my part.”
Detrich offered no explanation about why he was altering a photograph to make a personal print while on deadline with the newspaper and in the process of transmitting live images.
When asked why he was altering a news photograph in the first place, or making any changes at all in the image, Detrich said, “I was going to make a big print for myself. It wasn’t malicious. It just didn’t click on me. I’ve been covering this story for weeks. I didn’t even see Saturday’s newspaper, I went out of town Saturday afternoon.”
Asked why he didn't remember altering the photograph when asked about it this morning, but remembers it now after today's meeting with editors, Detrich said he didn't think of it this morning "while he was busy driving around."
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NPPA's Code of Ethics prohibits the digital manipulation of news photographs. “It is tempting to want to correct a flaw in an otherwise significant photograph, but whether it is done by photographer, editor, or lab tech, once a ‘moment’ has been captured on film or on digital media, we no longer have the right to change that image in any way except for minor dodging, burning, or cropping,” NPPA’s Ethics & Standards Committee chairperson John Long said today
“The legs in this photo are annoying, but they are there, in everyone’s frame, and ‘there’ is where they have to remain. Removing small details may be just a little lie, but the reading public does not make such distinctions. Big or small, significant or insignificant, a lie is a lie. And the public does not want to be lied to at all. Our credibility is all we have to offer the public and it must be protected. We cannot change the content of our photographs. We cannot lie.”
Detrich has been a staff photographer for the Toledo Blade since July 2000 where he shoots still photographs and develops multimedia projects for the Blade’s Web site. He’s been an NPPA member for more than two decades, and was NPPA’s Region 4 Photographer of the Year in 1991. Two times Detrich was the Ohio News Photographers Association Photographer of the Year (1991 and 1993), and he won the Ohio clip contest Photographer of the Year title in 1994.
Previously he was with the Blade’s bureau in Washington, DC, where he shot for Toledo and the Blade’s sister paper, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which are both owned by the Block News Alliance. Before that he worked for The Sunday Sun-Journal in Lewiston, ME; The Advertiser-Tribune in Tiffin, OH; the Daily Gazette in Xenia, OH; and The Kettering-Oakwood Times in Kettering, OH.
Update: On Friday, the Toledo Blade published this correction.
