A photographer for the Toledo Blade, Allan Detrich, digitally altered an image to remove a pair of legs from the frame of his shot of the Bluffton University baseball team. When the doctored photo was brought to the paper's editors a correction and apology was run in the paper, and the photogarpher's work went under serious review. Now the photographer has quit the paper and has in fact left photojournalism entirely.

I have lived the life of Journalism for the last 25 years. I have seen alot of changes, some good and some bad. I have shot millions of photos over my career and loved most every minute of it. I have covered events that most people would give their right arm to be at; let alone on the sidelines or sitting right down front. I have photographed every President since Reagan, and shook hands with many. I have traveled to Japan, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Panama for stories. I have lived a full journalistic life.

Lately it just has not been fun anymore, labor disputes, and routine assignments have left me with a Goundhog Day feeling. I resigned from the Blade on Saturday, with a long hug from my wife and an innocent high-five from my 6-year-old Noah.

The photojournalist in hot water for digitally altering a photo that makes it to publication has become, sadly, a relatively common story over the past couple years so I didn't comment on it when it first broke. However the photographer's decision to quit the Toledo Blade made me think about it a bit more and two aspects in particular. First why he'd alter a news photograph in such a manner. After first denying that he'd altered the photo he then said he'd done so because he wanted to make a print of the image for himself so we can assume that he considered the image considerably improved without the stray legs in the frame. I've looked at the images in question at length and I have to disagree with any assertion that the altered version is far superior than the original. So my question remains: why do such a major alteration?

Second, there have been several commenters on Mr. Detrich's blog who not only accept his apology over the incident but they support him emphatically and feel that the whole situation is overblown, and that any serious criticism of Detrich's altering the image is misplaced.

This morning Jason Kottke talked about the very famous Migrant Mother photograph that Dorthea Lange took in 1936. Kottke's piece is about how the woman in the photograph was very unhappy with the impact the photo had or didn't have on her life. Namely, since Lange included no contact information for the woman in her notes the woman never received any payment, compensation or even a print and since Lange didn't get any details about the woman's life or her story the impression created by the image and the title, Migrant Mother, was misleading at best and inaccurate at worst. Kottke concludes "Like all photographs, Migrant Mother is neither truth nor fiction but somewhere in-between."

So now I'm thinking about the two aspects of this incident that interest me in the context of Kottke's conclusion. If you allow that photographs live somewhere between truth and fiction then can editing out a pair of legs be much worse than composing a shot where the legs are left out? Or cropping the image down so that the part of the frame where the extra legs were is missing? What's the difference between those 3? Intent, technical skill, access to Photoshop? Different in camera framing, digital altering, and cropping would have all had the same effect on this image. They would have all managed to leave out part of the story. The part left out is that beside a group of reflective, mourning ballplayers you have a set of legs that belong to a partially obscured photographer who is almost on top of the ballplayers. All the published shots of this scene that I've seen were taken from a respectful distance, away from the ballplayers but the photographer who was caught in Detrich's image is very, very close to the players.

When I first saw the photos, read all the stories, etc I didn't give much thought to who the legs belonged to. I assumed they were a parent, a team manager, or someone affiliated with the team and honestly couldn't imagine why the photographer would edit them out. Now that I know they belonged to a photographer who was, in my opinion, uncomfortably close to a very private, personal moment for the surviving teammates, I can now think of at least one reason to edit those legs out: taking out an interloper after the fact. Was this Detrich's motivation? I don't think so but it's possible and one more angle to the story. That brings me back to Kottke's thoughts on photographs being between truth and fiction. Like the edited picture Kottke's statement is at least partially true but it also doesn't tell the whole story. Photographs tell a story and many small steps along the process determine what story a particular photograph tells. Compose one way and the shot tells one story, compose another and the story is completely different. Post process the image one way and the story is very accurate and true to life, post process another way and everything, save the bare facts of the image, is changed.

Photojournalist, perhaps more than any other photographers, are telling stories with their images. Anyone who admires, studies, practices or even thinks about photography knows that there is no way a single photograph can capture every detail of a scene or an event. There is no way that a single photograph can tell the entire story. But since we know we're only going to get part of the story in any given news image we want that image and the story it is telling to be as accurate and as truthful as it can be. So while I understand the people who support Detrich and think the situation got blown out of proportion I have to disagree. By altering this news image he broke the fundamental unwritten contract between photojournalists and viewers, which is that he give us the most accurate, truthful story he can in his images while we will trust him and the story he is telling and we'll let it touch us and impact our lives. Digital tools make breaking this contract a lot easier and a lot easier to get away with but that doesn't make it right.