Digital BW, The Print

>> Near the end of his life, Adams produced prints
>> intended to represent his life's work not just as a series of
>> landscape images but as a panorama of the possibilities of
>> the "straight," unmanipulated style to which he adhered."
> 
> I don't consider AA's work unmanipulated at all. Did you see the
> straight print of "Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite" in his book "The
> Print"? It has nothing to do with the "finished" print presented few
> pages later. If his photographs were not manipulated the contact print
> and the enlargement of the same negative would look identical apart the
> sizing (which is impossible in the case of AA).
>...
> 
> Regards,
> Loris.

William Shakespeare asked and answered this question for us more than 4
centuries ago - "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other
name would smell as sweet" Frank Stella is exhibiting work that most of us
would call sculpture, but he calls them painting. I am not trying to say
that naming and classification is unimportant, rather that when referring to
art (or any aesthetic) that the real value transcends its label.

On the other hand a LA Times photographer, was recently fired for
manipulating an image in Photoshop that ran in the paper as if it was a
"straight" or a faithful document of a moment during the Iraq War. But this
sort of manipulation has been going on since Matthew Brady began dragging
dead bodies around the battlefield for better composition during the US
Civil War. He did not need Photoshop to manipulate the "truth" within a
photograph. 

This is the thing about photography - it lies and tells the truth
simultaneously.  

Wendel