Is photomontage photography?

Question

I frequent 500px and enjoy viewing and voting the photos there. I thought I was mostly looking at photography on this site but it seems that my eyes were fooled more then a few times. (And this is not specific to 500px but other Photography sites as well) I am not talking about obvious "traditional" photomontage but rather images that almost seem to pose to be "real" photos.

Personally, I feel a bit tricked by these "photos" especially when seeing all the other users' comments who obviously think they are seeing "photography". (I am deliberately not linking specific photos) Doesn't this sort of thing belong to digital art or even digital rendering along the lines of Povray?

As for 500px, I was under an assumption that this site is for photography. To quote a few references; "500px.com: World's Best Photographs" and "500px is Photography"

I don't doubt that some photomontage is art but does photomontage belong in photography?

Asked by Jakub

Answer

Ah, I see. This is one of those "where do you draw the line" things, isn't it? Is it still photography if you manipulate contrast or colour balance? Dodge or burn? Retouch complexions? Do HDR? Stitch panoramas? That's not being true to the negative, so to speak, either. How about when you use artificial lighting? Is that cheating? How much does the technique of creating an image using photographic processes have to be limited before it's "pure enough" for everybody?

Compositing is almost as old as photography itself. And much of it was originally done in-camera, since direct-to-image processes (such as Daguerreotypy) were technically far superior to negative processes for many years. Much of the photographic work I've done over the years has involved compositing, either in the darkroom or more recently in the computer. (Photoshop and its kin are a whole lot easier than stripping, lithing and masking, but it's not more inherently evil.) That can involve setting up a number of shots at different scales with the same apparent perspective and lighting (from miniatures to human models to grand landscapes), and if you think there's no photography involved in something like that just because it wasn't done as a single exposure in-camera, you're out of your gourd.

These days, I shoot mostly headshots and portraiture pro bono. A lot of what I do is in unpleasant environments (particularly in long-term care hospital facilities), and the object of my game is not to document end-of-life conditions, but to leave families with the best possible memories when the inevitable day arrives. (That's one of the reasons why I'm unlikely to post images here very often—what I do, when I can do it, is rather intimate and somewhat invasive, and not for public gawking.) Is what I do less photographic because I do background replacements and clean up the ravages (and accessories) of disease and old age? I don't lie; I selectively withhold the more brutal aspects of the truth. As far as I'm concerned, what I'm doing is precisely the difference between being a photographer and operating a camera.

Your opinion of both my older commercial work and my current charitable work as photography may be different from mine. That's okay. There's room for a lot of differing opinions in this world. But I've always been convinced that it's the ability to create art with a camera rather than merely record what's there that makes the difference between a creative photographer and a technician.

(jrista posted an answer while I was typing that is going to get my vote. I just needed to vent a little bit of spleen.)

Answered by Stan Rogers

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