The misconception of modern digital work flow and its effect on truth in photography

This image taken in Akureyri, north Iceland. Is it truthful, photoshoped or what?

I got a email recently from a friend and a fellow photographer Mats Wibe Lund with a link to a Norwegian news article about images being disqualified from a competition because they where worked on in Photoshop and thus not considered truthful representation of the actual situation.

It is quiet funny that some people in some judging comity can be so sure of the situation that created the base of the image, if they where not on the spot where the image was taken.

The problem we are facing now is that when the world is being bombarded with photographs and the knowledge spreads that you can manipulate photographs. People tend to think that with the introduction of computers, altering images has been made a lot easier. People are starting to think this is something new.
The fact is that in some limited cases it has, in others not. The ease of which you can do realistic manipulation is greatly exaggerated but has lead to the misconception that the only images that are true are the images as they are represented straight from the camera. Raw images have to be presented.

This thought is a great danger to the medium and I am overly surprised when photographers (other than press photographers or photo journalists) talk about not manipulating their images.
How on earth a landscape photographer that presents an image in super saturated colors with burnt in sky, heavy amount of dodging and burning and bringing in light here and there on top of enhancing contrast, even manages to think about weather he should remove a soda bottle that is in the foreground or not puzzles me.

What puzzles me most is that you are producing a image of what you saw in your mind at that point and given time and through all sorts of technology you manage to produce this image and then you start to think weather you should enhance this expression or stick to some ethics that have nothing to do with artistic expressions.

More and more competitions are seeing rules that are so stupid that if we let them be, they will highly cramp the style of the medium and in the end we will only see flat snaps that will not only kill the medium but also the press it is published in.

Photography is one of the biggest seller of any print media there is. No matter what any one says it is the main selling factor used mostly in connection with a headline.
It is no coincidence that almost every magazine front page has a big bright and bold picture. Publishers know it sells.

And that is the dilemma photography has. On one hand we have photographers that truthfully want to show the world what their experienced. On the other hand we have to use their images to sell magazines and newspapers to fund those images. Majority of photographers on the other hand do not at all care about weather photography tells the truth or not. They just want to express them self through this medium.

Photography has never been able to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Photography at its best is a feeling, it is not about what you see in the picture but how you feel after looking at the pictures.