I just found this blog post by Scott Bourne that I find pretty relevant to what we're talking about here.
Photography v. Reality Photofocus
>SNIP>
I really have trouble with a blogger like Scott Bourne who calls Arnold Newman "one of the first environmental portraitists". No way--Newman began working around 1942 or so...August Sander was an unquestioned master of the environmental portrait, and began working professionally in 1901. The work of August Sander was a big influence on photographers for almost two full decades before Newman began his professional career. Newman came along 40 years after Sander began...Sander was well-known, famous even, back when Newman began his professional career while working for hire shooting 49 cent studio portraits in New York City [literally, 49 cents]. By the time Newman started in the business, Sander had been shooting professionally for roughly 41 years...
I'm just sayin'...Beaumont Newhall wrote The History of Photography many years ago, and Mr. Bourne's understanding of who was first in environmental portraiture is a seriously flawed assertion, off by four decades.
Photography has changed greatly over the years. There have been many essays written about what "is" and "is not" photography, and the debates began in the 1850's,and have continued across the decades. Pictorialism was huge at one time, but it gave way to the deep depth of field and sharp renderings of the so-called f/64 Group aka the Group f/64 people, most famous of which turned out to be Ansel Adams. Over the decades, what is considered photography has changed quite a bit, and now that silver-based emulsion on substrate has been replaced by pixel wells and electrical charges stored in computer files, "photography" has changed in a very fundamental way. There is no longer a fixed, permanent negative or positive with the silver granuales and grains and or dye clusters all arranged in one,discrete order; the "image" now is all a bunch of 1's and 0's, and we can no longer view an image capture as a plate or negative or positive transparency--we need a computer to see the image in any form.
"Pure photography" is a difficult term to pin down. There really is no such thing as pure photography--that's just an impossible definition to work with. But there is a distinction between photography and digital illustration, computer-generated imagery, documentary versus artistic photography, and so on. Those arguing that Photoshop imitates the traditional darkroom are greatly oversimplifying or even distorting the nature of modern image editing software; we can take a digitized image today and make HUGE global changes, as well as small changes,adjustments, and montages in just seconds to minutes. The same degree of control did not and will never exist in silver-based images simply because a computer can perform many more steps than any human worker can perform in a darkroom using any of the old-time darkroom processes like Cibachrome, C-print, dye transfer, silver gelatin, or platinum/palladium,etc. On a silver-based capture, like a negative, there is a definite order and arrangement of the image that the photographer works from; with a digital image file, the order of the pixels can be easily and quickly altered,and the results previewed before a print is developed, washed,dried,and reviewed. Traditional film-based photography and digital capture are really very different beasts, in many ways.
A good example a lot of simple thinkers trot out is Jerry Uelsmann, who is probably the most famous traditional darkroom photo montage artists of the 1960's,1970's,and 1980's. He is one of the masters of the photo montage printed in the wet darkroom,and it took him many,many years to develop his skill level, and he was one of only a handful of photographers of the modern era to become widely famous as a photo manipulator. Today, what Uelsmann took decades to master in the traditional darkoom,working with multiple negatives, a tens of thousands of Photoshop jockeys can accomplish sitting at a desk, sipping a $4 Starbucks latte and working with a mouse and pen and tablet. Today,fantastical, surreal,incredible "darkroom work" can be done by high school kids. So, saying that post-processing has always been a part of photography is rather a simplistic over-exaggeration; to use an analogy, that's like saying, "the Wright brothers were involved in the aerospace industry." Ehh....no, not really.
Photography was concerned with depicting reality very early on...then the photo montage craze took hold and by the 1870's there were loads of crazy,wild allegorical multiple-negative photographs made...by the late 1920's, the mainstream shifted to the sharp,well-defined look Adams made his living shooting...by the early 1970's that style of imagery lost favor and more fanciful,more-manipulated pictures became fashionable...now we are in another period where representational or "straight" images are giving way to more heavily-manipulated, computer-generated images--much like happened in the 1870's and the 1960's-1970's era.
Honestly, while images fashions have swung back and forth like the proverbial pendulum, since the 1840's, we are now entering into an entirely NEW era, where the "picture" no longer begins with a real,tangible, fixed image file, but just a bunch of 1's and 0's that only a computer can render.
The biggest difference between digital imaging and traditional photography is that digital imaging requires a computer, while in traditional photography a computer is *optional*. And because of that, digital imaging allows us almost unlimited possibilities in image reconstruction and adjustment, while darkroom-based imaging has definite limitations. I'm not saying either is better or more noble, but there are some huge differences between traditional photography methods,like shooting on film and making traditional silver gelatin B&W prints, and modern, digital capture that is computer-adjusted and inkjet printed.
... Not good! But none of that is the point I want to discuss here.
if the point was not to tell a story, then why bother moving the person?
