Believing that a photograph should be untampered with and presented as it is, I had considered that anything else was as good as fraud. Fraud against truth and all that is real. This I feel was due to the image (pun unintended) photography has acquired, that it is meant to show things as they are...
But then I realised that this is the case only when we are talking about photography whose objective is to portray the truth as in documentary and journalistic photography.
It is now my belief that if you are dealing with photography as an art form, the objective of the artist is to convey a message/emotion to the viewer. This makes a photograph just the 'raw material' that the artist uses to convey his/her message/emotion. So, you might say that the act of taking the photograph is a mere beginning of the journey that the image will take to finally convey the artist's thought. For after all an artist is only trying to convey what is on his/her mind, the means that the medium he uses is nothing more than just that.
Another issue that comes to mind is digital tools used to modify images. If you think that just because things happen at a mouse-click and hence anyone who uses them can only produce kitsch, think again! To use a digital tool to produce something that is tasteful and aesthically appealing, requires a certain sense, without which we might end up making, well, kitsch!
Next time somebody looks at an image and says, "So you manipulated it?", with a facial expression that seems to say, "So, you took dope to win the gold medal?", I will simply tell that person to read this post!
