Much of this discussion involves arguments that are quite common in journalism. There is no way to get "objective" reports from journalists except in the simplest contexts. "Joe Blow is dead" could be considered an objective statement if Joe Blow is in fact dead, but "Joe Blow is dead after a varied and active life" has now strayed from objectivity. This is all rudimentary, high-school-journalism-class stuff. What many, perhaps most, journalists agree upon is that they should strive to make reports as objective as possible, and "fair" as possible, while recognizing that true, theoretical objectivity and fairness is not possible. But you should strive for it, and striving for it usually produces superior reports.
What Alain has done, and what so many people here object to (I believe) is that Alain no longer strives for objectivity or fairness. (And he's not required to.) He apparently strives for sales. This is equivalent to the shows you see on MSNBC (left) and Fox News (right) which are called "journalism" but which take raw information and then re-work it to conform with a previously determined point of view, which the networks apparently hope will draw in viewers who find that viewpoint congenial. Alain's photographs apparently strive to present a commonly accepted, middle-brow version of "beauty" that is marketable, and has little to do with any concept of objectivity or fairness. Other versions of "beauty" may not be as marketable.
But images are just images, and images themselves never lie, because pigment on paper can't talk. The images simply are. The only "right" or "wrong" in all of this is how the images are represented by the people who make them. If Alain calls them "sunset photos of the Grand Canyon" then he's committing an intellectual fraud. If he simply calls them "photos of the Grand Canyon," which they are, then he's not. Not informing a buyer that the colors have been strenuously manipulated would be problematic. If the buyer asks about the colors, then it clearly would be dishonest if you did not say that they had been manipulated.
What about the buyer who walks into a gallery, ooo's and ahh's over a photo, but never asks about details before buying? Well, that would be up to the photographer, but I'd feel a little dishonest if I didn't mention that the photo had been worked -- but that gets into a whole lot of complicated and individual concepts concerning honesty.
All of this is complicated by problems of competence. What do you think about a reporter (or photographer) who strives for objectivity and fairness but is simply incompetent? What about cases when a photograph is heavily manipulated, but really does, in fact, make it more conform to reality (I'm thinking of such things as creating true verticals in a photo, when the raw image shows lens distortions.) I'm running OS X Yosemite, and one of the screen saver options is a photograph of the moon, in the background, with a slice of earth and its atmosphere in the foreground. When that screen-saver came up the other day, I noticed that the moon was not round (the moon is actually an oblate spheroid, and is not truly round, but the variance is so small you can't see it.) I actually measured the variation on the screen, and it's there -- the moon image is wider horizontally than vertically. But where does this variation come in? Is it in the way the pixels are arranged in the monitor, or in the original photo, or was the image stretched to fill the aspect ratio of the iMac? Was it inadvertent, or deliberate, or part of a mechanism? I just don't know. But the image is nice, and I had no trouble recognizing the moon...
