The Photograph as Art

“Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed ‘artists’. And contemporary vision, the new life, is based on honest approach to all problems, be they morals or art. False fronts to buildings, false standards in morals, subterfuges and mummery of all kinds, must be, will be scrapped.”
-Edward Weston


"Pascal Dangin is the premier retoucher of fashion photographs. Art directors and admen call him when they want someone who looks less than great to look great, someone who looks great to look amazing, or someone who looks amazing already—whether by dint of DNA or M·A·C—to look, as is the mode, superhuman. (Christy Turlington, for the record, needs the least help.) In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore."
"Picture Perfect." -Lauren Collins (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_collins?currentPage=all)


When photography was introduced, first as a form of documentation and later as an art form, it was considered pure--what is in the photo is what actually existed. Yet what is often forgotten is that photography IS an art--and is, therefore, subject to the whims of the person behind the camera. Lighting, perspective, exposure all make a drastic effect on what appears in the photograph, and is often NOT what one would see had he been standing in the same place as the photographer when he took the shot.

Yet now, interestingly enough, photography is even more a painterly art form than it once was. Everything in a photograph can be idealized, from the color of the grass to a lengthening of the legs.

I feel that this is often forgotten. Frequent complaints are lodged against editors of magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair, claiming the human subjects in the magazines' images are misrepresentations of the true human form. Yet hasn't this been true for centuries, if not millenia? Painters, sculptors, artists of all kinds have interpreted and idealized the human form since they have been creating it. Now, however, the "photograph" is still considered "true," that it does not lie--yet the photographer is an artist, the photograph his art, and the camera (and computer) the tools with which he executes his pieces... and liberty should be afforded him.

For more information, an article written last year in the New Yorker on the famous image retoucher Pascal Dangin:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_collins?currentPage=all