I suspect that pre 1990 worldwide the fraction of photos worldwide given any sort of post capture "intervention" approached 0.0000001% of all pictures taken. Certainly nothing to give widespread applicability to the claims that "photographers have always manipulated ..."
Only if you count in the point and shoot crowd, the Brownie camera crowd.
If you look at only semi-pros and pros, including the publishing industry, and you consider cropping, burning and dodging, as well as colorizing, then I think you can safely say that "photographers have always manipulated...."
And in truth, just selecting your color slide film pretty much guarenteed that you were manipulating the color, because side films have had individual color biases since the 1970s at least, I suspect.
Besides, photographers have been using polarizers and color filters on their color films for at least 40 years as well.
But those two operations are pre-capture.
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Emily L. Ferguson
mailto:elf@xxxxxxxx 508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races, press photography http://www.vsu.cape.com/~elf/
