Digital BW, The Print

On 5/1/03 10:02 AM, "Alan Zinn" <AZinn@...> wrote:

> Many people are aware of
> specific instances of falsity in magazine photos. There was a neat segment
> on PhotoShopped images last night - 48hrs, CBS.
> 
> I'd love to see a useful, short statement that addresses print v. original
> film image honesty.  Something like:  "Un-altered camera image."

I understand that changing image composition in Photoshop is a major problem
if your are a photojournalist...but if you are an artist...what difference
could that possibly make?  Art is about the final image and message that it
conveys and it seems to me irrelevant how you created that image.  Many of
my favorite "old" photographs by Man Ray were created with multiple
exposures in the darkroom.  How is this different from merging images in
Photoshop?  Perhaps this attitude is a holdover from photography as
documentation, which I don't do...but I really resent the idea that someone
who is masterful in Photoshop at composing an image is any less of an
authentic artist than someone who manages to capture the image on a single
negative...this just seems unnecessarily elitist and hopelessly conservative
to me...but I was trained as an artist, not a photographer.

If you are a photojournalist, forgive my diatribe...I think we all want to
know that the news that we see and hear was true to what happened...but for
art...at least I want to know that the art was true to what was imagined.

Robert