It's interesting, but it ain't photography

If you're interested in photography, there's a cyber exhibition on the Rangefinder site not to miss. This is a magazine, by the way, that comes free to professionals and if you qualify, it's a gift to look forward to each month.

This exhibition is particularly interesting to me because of its electronically manipulated images. If you missed my observations on that subject, and if you care a twig about photography, you should read it here.

Also read the additions to those thoughts by a couple other photographers. Gary Smith, who many years ago was among the Advocate's best gunners, wrote about the effect of Photoshop at this link and Rich Bergeman, a long-ago Advocate news editor, bemoaned the watering-down of art photography by "pixelgraphing" here.

There are some truly excellent images in the Rangefinder exhibition. Most offer clear visual messages that speak to a kaleidoscope of emotions. I suspect that many, if not most, of them are heavily manipulated, further opening photography's most important consideration of the day: Are they photos, or something else?

The definition of exactly what these things are, and the truth-in-captioning of such images would give the pixelgraph movement a purity and an honesty that it sorely needs; it would also provide a different - unspoiled - arena for photographic purists.