Flash vs Photoshop

When I was studying photography at The Technical School of Reykjavik we went on a fieldtrip to the Icelandic Museum of Photography. At the end of our tour of the museum, the curator, a woman in her thirties(relevant as she was clearly not of a generation that only had wetplate or camera obscura at their disposal), walked us through an exebition of some work by the Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk. Tunbjörk sometimes uses some big flashes to light up outside environments. Scenes like suburbs and supermarkets get an erie feeling because of this. At the last photo the curator said smugly that the best thing about Tunbjörk was that he didn’t use any photoshop-tricks to manipulate his photos and did not cheat in that way.

This led me to thinking, so many consider Photoshop as a manipulation, cheating and false in some way. Flash on the other hand is considered by the same people as a classic method in photography, but its added light so in a way the scene is not natural anymore. I think these purists should stick to their guns and only use pinhole.

There is much debate going on these days on how far we can go in photoshop. Some say its complicated but I don’t see it that way. Its simple as long as you do not add something to a frame from a completely different frame it’s a photograph. Otherwise it’s a photo illustration. In both instances it can be art.

There is a great article on Luminous Landscape about a photographer dealing with accusations of falseness in his photographs a good read.

Just a note, I have gotten some feedback on this and have to clarify that I am not talking about Photojournalism, clearly there are other rules and considerations in that field.