My own metrics is that I will consider as photography any (digital) manipulation that can produced in the darkroom - however complex and exacting for the darkroom operator - and/or using light sensitive material.
This is an almost-workable metric, not that I'm agreeing with it, but it's almost workable.
There are some interesting questions around it:
- There are things that work in the black and white darkroom that don't work in the color darkroom. Are those now permissible?
- Is hand coloring, a very traditional photographic technique, allowed to be replicated? What about using some desaturation to get the same kinds of coloring that old, fading hand-colored photographs have? It couldn't be done in the darkroom, but it certainly replicates the looks of many old photos.
- Montage. Here;'s an interesting question. Montage is done in camera, and in the darkroom. A really good producer of photomontages (like Bob Bennett, who used to frequent this list), can make darkroom creations that rival the best PS montage work, although it's a very small number of people who can do this. So is montage - especially putting someone into a scene that wasn't there - a valid technique? (Here's a photo of me by Bob, to give an idea of what he can do with negatives and hand coloring - http://www.spirer.com/images/jeffbybob.jpg
- Some darkroom alterations and some alternative process techniques are known only by a few practitioners, and some people take offense when those techniques are replicated in Photoshop. How do you explain what can be done in the darkroom to people who have never gotten past the photo counter at Walmart?
Regarding that last question, one thing I have noticed is that the people who have the strongest negative reaction to PS work on images are frequently people who have never done their own darkroom work.
All things to think about, I guess....
Jeff Spirer
Photos: http://www.spirer.com
One People: http://www.onepeople.com/
Surfaces and Marks: http://www.withoutgrass.com
