An Update to Altered Images & Storytelling
Last week I wrote about the former Toledo Blade photographer who got caught digitally altering a photograph submitted for publication. Today Rob Galbraith brings the news that this was not a one time incident. The paper's investigation found dozens of seriously altered photos that were submitted by the photographer, many of which ended up in the paper or on the paper's website.
National Press Photographers Association says
Allan Detrich, a one-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and four-time Ohio News Photographer of the Year, is apparently a serial digital manipulator of news photographs. Prior to his resignation on April 7, Detrich had submitted for publication nearly 80 doctored images in only 14 weeks.
Even though photojournalists being caught altering photos is becoming more and more common the magnitude of this story is shocking.
An intensive investigation of Mr. Detrich's work, conducted by Nate Parsons, The Blade's director of photography, found that since January of this year, Mr. Detrich submitted 947 photographs for publication, of which 79 had been digitally altered.
The Blade offers a comparison PDF of some of the altered photos and their unaltered originals.
Mr. Detrich, as reported last week, has decided to leave photojournalism. He has also decided to disable comments on his blog.
The PDF is nuts!
The added basketball is so egregious and, add to that, he's a good but not great photo trickster. In the first photo, when you know what you're looking for you can see the distortion where the legs should be.
Wow.
I've been thinking a lot about how the digital media age has moved so quickly and I no longer know how to parse news anymore. I don't have any "trusted sources" because the search for "truth" has become so subjective and less important in news media.
Better to be first than right. Better to be pretty than accurate.
Ugh.
Ugh is right. As I mentioned in the piece last week I couldn't imagine why he'd doctor out the legs in the original photo because the altered version wasn't any better than the original. Now that I see fictional storytelling is more his version of photography it seems obvious that of course he'd doctor out or in anything that appealed to his aesthetic no matter how much it chipped away at the truth of the image.