I took some time out this past weekend to walk around the art festival in Gainesville that I was exhibiting at. With somewhere around twenty-six photographers exhibiting there, I was curious to see what kind of work was being shown. Overall, the predominate theme was of Florida landscape and nature photography. There was also several photographers with their own niches of landscapes and scenery from a variety of regions, florals, and a few unique people study collections. However, the one display that really caught my attention was from an artist whose work consisted of heavily manipulated surrealist images that were very prominently being declared as photographs. This lead me to ask myself the often debated question of “When does a photograph stop being a photo?”
On a semi-regular basis I get asked, “Did you do a lot of post-manipulation to your images?” The answer, of course, is it depends on which image you are asking about. With most of the images that I am currently displaying at art shows, the editing is usually limited to color correction or conversion, expansion of the dynamic range, and on a rare occasion the removal of a distracting element. Overall though, in almost all my images the base photo has only had a level of manipulation that could have been achieved in a traditional darkroom.
With that being said, I am in no way a photo purist that believes that a photograph should appear exactly as the original scene appeared. However, i do feel there is a certain point at which a photo has had so much digital manipulation that it can no longer be classified as purely a photograph and has now crossed a line into what should be under the “digital art” category.
I have noticed that some art shows do have a specific category for “digital art”. Though, in some cases such as The Melbourne Art Festival, there is actually no longer a photography category and only a digital arts category. This seems extremely wrong, since a photographer that is still using traditional photography is clearly not a “digital artist”.
What really bothered me about this one artist though was that he was pushing that he was a “photographer” in such a big way. He had a large metallic sign in his booth with his name underlined with the title “photographer”. In my opinion there had been so much splicing of multiple images and digital painting that this could no longer really be considered photography. It also kind of makes me want to see his source images, since when there is this amount of manipulation being performed it would be easy to cannibalize stock images into your work without anyone being able to tell.
Really, just like many other debates this is an entirely subjective debate and without some clearly defined standard there really is no clear cut answer. So, what do you think, when does a photo stop being a photo?
