honesty in photography

A day of beauty and frustration....nothing gets me like this inanimate intelligence that exists beyond my ability to connect to it(ie. my computer)...time and again it will not respond as I expect)....so instead of downloading my pictures for my photojournalism assignment I will just try to complete my DMF assignment of posting comments and visual sites. Perhaps Dennis will be able to help me figure out how to create my word press blog for photojournalism.... The site I will mention for this weeks purposes is Peterlik.com Peter Lik is an Australian born fine art landscape photographer who has galleries all over this country, and sells his hugely enlarged prints for bug bucks. I visited his gallery on Maui. What is interesting to me is that he is unwilling to admit that he has switched over to digital, or that he does some photo manipulation....he wants it to appear that all his photos are the record of an amazing moment of perfect lighting that he very patiently waited all day for, and captured on film.He says what produces the incredible depth of his photos is the very long exposures-about a 5minute window. I don't know enough about photography to evaluate this statement, but I have heard that another professional photographer looked at his images and said they were altered...All this leads me to wonder about how as a society we are thinking about where technology has brought us in terms of photography. Why is the manipulation done after the fact, any less an expression of the artists skill and aesthetic sense...true it is no longer an honest record of the moment...but why does the photographer feel compelled to keep that under wraps. Kind of like celebrities and face lifts..