TOLEDO -- A photographer with The Toledo Blade newspaper resigned last week after it was learned that one of his photos that ran on the front page of the paper had been digitally altered. Now the paper says dozens of other photos from the same photographer were also altered.
Allan Detrich resigned after admitting he digitally altered a photo of the Bluffton baseball team playing their home opener after a bus crash killed five team members. The photo shows the team clustered in center field, and five banners can be seen hanging from the fence, each with the name and number of a player who was killed.
In other photos of that same scene, a person can clearly be seen standing behind one of the banners, with their legs showing underneath. In Detrich's photo, the legs had been digitally removed.
The Toledo Blade says it has now discovered 78 more altered photos from Detrich. "We published 27 of them in the newspaper and toledoblade.com, and 31 of the altered photos just on toledoblade.com, another 21 of the photos were not published at all," said Luann Sharp, a spokesperson for The Blade.
The Blade says that Detrich erased people, tree limbs and utility poles from some photos.
"It's a zero tolerance, everyone who works here knows you can't alter a quote. It's what a person says and you can't alter a photograph when you publish it," said Sharp. "That is what you saw when you were there."
