The Unethical Post

If you are a photojournalist, you have likely heard about the altered photo controversy out of Ohio last week. Basically, photographer Allan Detrich removed a pair of legs from the background of a photo, a huge sin in the photojournalism world. He doesn't deny the alteration (at least not anymore), but claims he was doing it for his personal files, and didn't mean for it to end up in the paper. Here is the photo and the correction the Toledo paper ran:

I'm actually pretty upset about the situation. It's not just about the gross lapse in journalistic ethics. It goes beyond that. What really got me going was the reaction some people had to the situation. There were tons of comments on various blogs and message boards condemning Detrich, but there were some that made me think that ethics, at least to the average reader, are already dead.

Here's a comment from bladevent.com, which has blogged heavily on the situation:
"I’m just curious as to why this is such a big deal. He removed a pair of legs from the photo. So what? Is it a big deal just because it was against the paper’s policy?"

But some of the worse were from Detrich's own blog, many from people who claimed to be photographers themselves:
"Your apology is unnecessary, and it is unfortunate that you feel compelled to offer it. You made a beautiful and sensitive picture in the highest tradition of photojournalism. You took out an extraneous and unrelated distraction, a distraction that any observer of that scene would have automatically edited from his memory of the event...The Blade owes you an apology. Please accept mine it its stead."

"Nothing you did to the image in any way altered its intent or meaning, which should IMHO, be the yardstick by which "alterations" to news photos should be judged."

In the highest tradition of photojournalism? The yardstick alterations should be judged? Have our industry's ethical standards become some arbitrary set of guidelines that have no meaning outside of the newsroom? It is just so endlessly discouraging.

So to offset the legs cloned out of Deitrich's photo, I have cloned legs into a photo I shot today, hopefully resetting photojournalism's delicate ethical equilibrium.


Yeah, that's about as ridiculous as some of those comments on Detrich's blog.