It is more or less exactly this debate which spurred my essay in the first place. We're seeing all the usual moves:
"I move lights around"
"I do a lot of photoshop"
"By pressing the button I create because electrons something something"
"Is not selecting actually the same thing as creation?"
all to justify photography AS an act of creation. Which suggests, frankly, an urgent desire to identify oneself AS a creative, not as a, as it were, selective. Virtually everyone in this thread appears to be offended or upset, at least slightly, at the idea that what they do is not at its core creative but rather selective.
There is a curious parallel with the Victorian gentleman who argued, cogently and loudly, that photography WAS NOT ART because it was purely mechanical, at the bottom. The response was to add all manner of creative "stuff" to the mechanical processes, and we wound up with the worst excesses of the Pictorialists.
My aim is not to demean you as a "mere selective" but to uplift you, to validate and empower you, as a "selective". And, by all means, move lights around and photoshop all the night long in addition!
The Victorians, as well as both modern critics and photographers, confusedly assume that it cannot be Art unless it includes creation.
Any photographer knows that, even if you stick to the purely mechanical, if you move no lights and do no photoshop, sometimes by a mysterious alchemy, pretty good pictures turn up anyways.
So it became clear to me that Art must be separated from Creation (something Duchamp was at some pains to teach us almost 100 years past). Once Art is free to roam, it might as well be attached to Selection to see if that works, and when you try it out, lo, it does.
Rob C might claim "direction" as a creative act and I will not deny him that. But I am certain also that Rob would admit that in the end it comes down to pressing the button >now< rather than.... >now<, that is, to an act of selection.
