is photography dead?

[jackelope]

from newsweek...http://www.newsweek.com/id/73349

....We live in a culture dominated by pixels, increasingly unmoored from corpor-eal reality. Movies are stuffed with CGI and, in such "performance animation" films as "Beowulf," overwhelmed by them. Some big pop-music hits are so cyberized the singer might as well be telling you to press 1 if you know your party's exten-sion. Even sculpture has adopted digital "rapid prototyping" technology that allows whatever a programmer can imagine to be translated into 3-D objects in plastic. Why should photography be any different? Why shouldn't it give in to the digital temptation to make every landscape shot look like the most absolutely beautiful scenery in the whole history of the universe, or turn every urban view into a high-rise fantasy?

Photography is finally escaping any dependence on what is in front of a lens, but it comes at the price of its special claim on a viewer's attention as "evidence" rooted in reality. As gallery material, photographs are now essentially no different from paintings concocted entirely from an artist's imagination, except that they lack painting's manual touch and surface variation. As the great modern photographer Lisette Model once said, "Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." She had no idea how easy exotic effects would get, and just how hard that would make it to capture beauty and truth in the same photograph. The next great photographers—if there are to be any—will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality. And they'll have to do it in a brand-new way.

any thoughts??

[boneaddict]

I do despise and hate the stuff Kings calenders comes up with.  All photo shop generated.  I like the real thing. I quite the NRTH American Hunting club beause it started using computer generated pictures instead of the real thing in its magazine.

[huntnphool]

Me too Bone. As I can tell yours are, all the pics I have posted are as they were shot, although mine have been reduced from RAW to jpeg. Maybe this is why B&C only accept photos for entries at this point?

[popeshawnpaul]

I'm not quite sure this is a new or novel thought.  We have been dealing with this issue since my days as a newspaper photographer 10+ years ago.  Back then we would be criticized for flipping a photo or burning/dodging.  (for flipping, we would reverse it so that the person's face was looking inside the newspaper if the space for the photo happened to be on the edge)  We did not manipulate the actual photo, but rather flipped it inside out.  Some people took offense to that.  We came up with some rules that most publishers follow.  Adjust levels, rubber stamp dust, sharpen, and finally crop.  Most things outside that realm were not allowed for newspapers.  I see both sides though as people can create some really wonderful pictures with photoshop.  (I have done tons of heavy manipulation for college yearbooks etc.)  I think the problem lies where people try and pass it off as real.  I think everyone should know right from the start whether it is authentic or manipulated.  Photography like I use to know it is dead (film).  However, digital photography has developed into a new artistic medium I never thought was possible and I like the direction it is going.

[sisu]

I like the digital, but I don't like computer generated photos...real is best. Digital enhancement is OK but keep it real.