Of course film photography can lie but there seems to me to be a more direct connection between a photographic negative and reality as we perceive it, possibly because faking a negative is a great deal more difficult than cutting and pasting in Photoshop.
I prefer photographs that don't appear to have had any tweaking. For me, those 'obvious' changes in post diminish a photograph's connection to reality and hence its authority. Of course if you just want make pretty pictures, it's fine.
Which of course is your right no one would deny you that. There are at least a couple of philosophical approaches to photography as see it. One is the reportage/documentary approach. Many people practice this approach which for many purists, in principle abhors any changes to the image to get the final image. For obvious reasons perhaps.
But it is not always so clear cut.
I recall something of a controversy several years ago when a photographer was awarded a prize by National Geographic for a stunning shot for, if memory serves me correctly, a shot of a group of people on the banks of a river in a developing country with stunning golden hour lighting (though I seem to recall the image being in black and white or low saturation due to the subdued lighting). A solo piece of trash (paper I seem to recall) was way over out at the edge of the photo and this automatically drew the eye to it because it was a blob of white in a sea of dark shadow. Without a doubt it distracted from the image to some extent.
The photographer removed it before submitting his shot and made the image indisputably better from an artistic perspective - though it was irrelevant from a documentary one. No other changes were made. When this was found out his award was removed, not because he took the trash out of the image but because of
how he did it. He cloned it out in Photoshop but would have been allowed to keep the award had he chosen instead to crop the image to exclude it or applied a dark vignette to hide it. Such techniques were deemed to be OK had he used them seemingly because they emulated analogue darkroom techniques of image manipulation which were permitted by the rules of the contest. OK I have no great problem with that - these were the rules of that contest and the photographer knew or should have known of them. But (and here is my main point) they are not the rules of life.
I would make two further points about this.
First there there can be a fine line between what is documentary and what is art. Was Ansel Adams a documentarist or an artist? I would say the latter because he spent hours in a darkroom perfecting prints often making many versions of an image before he arrived at one he preferred. It also follows that a documentary image can be art - the best ones often are.
The second point is do not rush to denigrate artists or the artististic approach as being somehow inferior to documentarists. Van Gogh was an artist. So was Monet. So was Picasso. But no one can say they were documentary painters who represented life in a realistic manner. And the same could be said for many photographers - my personal hero was Saul Leiter many of who's images deliberately distorted reality in a beautiful painterly way. The entire point of their work was that they each adopted various styles which carefully and deliberately eschewed a more realist /documentary approach.
I can't claim to be a Van Gogh, a Monet, a Picasso or a Leiter for that matter. But yes, I like pretty pictures.
🙂 And yes I will even admit to sometimes going over the edge in editing my images and often regret it later - I do not mind my editing being obvious but much prefer it when they are only a little obvious. Getting the balance is not always easy - though sometimes I go the other way in processing and give my images "the full Monte" just for the hell of it, or as an experiment.
🙂
EDIT: I found a link to the article I referred to. The photographer's name was Harry Fisch, the river was in India almost certainly the Ganges in or near Varanasi (which I thought to be the case) and the offending object was not a piece of paper it was a piece of plastic. Not too bad recollection after almost 7 years.
https://petapixel.com/2013/01/10/cr...hotog-has-winning-nat-geo-contest-photo-dqed/
