By Donald R. Winslow
© 2007 News Photographer magazine
TOLEDO, OH (April 7, 2007) – Staff photographer Allan Detrich of The Toledo Blade has been suspended from work while editors continue to investigate his digitally altered page one news photograph from last week. The Associated Press in New York has pulled any of his photographs from their archives and Detrich's photographs, which were also available for purchase on printroom.com, have apparently also been removed from that commercial Web site.
Detrich claims that his alteration of last Saturday’s page one photograph of the Bluffton University baseball team kneeling in front of outfield banners “was for his personal files” and that the wrong file was transmitted to the newspaper while he was on deadline “by mistake.”
The veteran photographer was scheduled to be off Friday and Saturday and return to work on Sunday, but Blade editors informed him on Friday that he was suspended for at least two days, with pay, beginning Sunday and continuing through Monday as their investigation continues.
When told of his suspension Detrich was also asked to turn in photography gear that is owned by the Blade, sources said.
Editors and the director of photography at the Blade are now looking back through all of Detrich’s previous work to see if other published photographs have been digitally altered. Blade assistant managing editor for administration Luann Sharp said they’re looking to see if this was a “one time occurrence or if it has happened before.”
On Friday the Blade published this correction.
In Detrich’s altered photograph the legs of a photographer standing behind one of the outfield banners were removed from the image. His picture was altered to show only outfield grass and the fence. Photographs by other photographers who were shooting for large Ohio newspapers showed the blue jean legs standing or kneeling behind the banners. The similar photographs ran on many Ohio front pages on Saturday, the first papers published after the Friday event. Staff photographers in Dayton noticed the discrepancy on Saturday, and it quickly became a hot topic of discussion in the photojournalism community.
Detrich posted an entry on his personal blog after the incident and wrote about the altered photo. He wrote, “Yes. It was what it was, but I wanted it perfect, and maybe that is where I went wrong, trying to be perfect, in the end showed my flaws...”
The photographer is a native of Attica, OH, and attended the Ohio Institute of Photography in Dayton. 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. He was also the Blade’s bureau photographer 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.
In 1998, Detrich was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature photography for a five part series "Children of the Underground." It was an in-depth look at a covert underground organization that hides sexually abused children. Two times Detrich was the Ohio News Photographers Association Photographer of the Year (1991 and 1993), he won the Ohio clip contest Photographer of the Year title in 1994, and in 1991 he was the NPPA Region 4 Photographer of the Year.
