David Hockney says photography is dead as an artform because it's too easy to manipulate images now. This strikes me as a very strange criticism. He seems most interested in the way photography in the past has been able to make claims to truth, apparently because of the naivete of popular perception. But I don't see how any sophisticated reader can look at past photographs as truth: photographers clearly have always made choices about what to photograph, how to contextualize it, how to light it, how to focus it, etc. Aren't these manipulations? I could imagine someone saying only certain manipulations can be called photography, but that isn't Hockney's argument at all.
Call me a relativist, but photography — the art which captures perhaps most directly what's going on in the real world — seems like the best possible foil for this notion that somehow we can make artistic statements that directly and perfectly communicate the world around us. The "art" of photography is in that manipulation; to the extent that the subject itself is artistic, we can understand it as a matter of framing and selection. If the entire creative enterprise exists in this space between the real world and the image produced, won't digital manipulations simply expand that space, and increase the range of artistic possibility?
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