I will briefly register my disagreement with this thread.
The research is thin and sloppy, which is to be expected when you rely almost entirely on wikipedia. He's equating Pictorialism with Composite Printing, which is simply wrong. He inexplicably leaves HP Robinson out of his list of historical figures.
He introduces ideas like "Image Manipulation vs. Manipulating Reality" and "Technical Retouching vs. Creative Retouching" and then simply drops them.
Vast swathes of the piece are simply copied from wikipedia (with citations, to be sure, but they're just cut&pastes, sometimes with a very light edit).
There is no synthesis, there's simply repetitions of "questions" of the sort that are raised by people on internet forums. This debate, like the "is photography art?" has not been a serious debate in decades. Rather, it's a straw debate we can haul out to discuss whenever we need some content and haven't got any ideas.
If this was presented purely as a piece of "look, this is how I do my work, here is my process" I would have no problem with it. But it is instead a weird mixture of that along with several thousand words of a high-school student's notion of "scholarship" stirred in, for no apparent reason.
Is there a thesis in here? Is there even an organizing principle?
While there's a bunch of definitions made and questions raised, the entire thing seems to boil down to: I manipulate images and I think that's OK. Oh, and, have some wikipedia entries. If there's any more actual content in there, could someone please summarize it for me?
I will grant that I'd rather see people photoshopping their photos than smashing up coral reefs, though.
