on maintaining reality

I struggled with the idea of Photoshop for a long time.  I disapproved of photo manipulation because the result didn’t seem as real as the original.  The more I thought about it, though, the more I wondered when exactly the photograph stopped reflecting reality.  When I mess with the white balance?  That doesn’t seem logical, because I use the automatic white balance setting on my camera, because I know I can just change it later.  So, it seems arbitrary to say that changing the white balance on the camera maintains the reality of the photograph, but changing the white balance in Adobe Camera Raw distorts the reality of the photo.  The same thing applies to exposure, contrast/brightness, sharpness, saturation, &c.

Ok, so now I have a set of operations that I can perform in Photoshop without rendering the photograph “unreal.”  But, if my camera somehow had a way of applying gradient maps, would that be allowable in Photoshop too?  Or what about tinkering with the individual RGB curves?  Or, what about inserting a person into the photograph who wasn’t in the scene, or adding a garage door onto a living room?  Why should the abilities of the camera determine the “reality” of the photograph?

So, my new theory is that no photograph is “real.”  A photograph can function in a lot of ways, but the closest that it can be to the “reality” of the scene being photographed is a mere imitation of that scene.  So, why aim for imitation?  Art is not mere mimesis.  I’m not saying, by any means, that the photographs I take are “ART,” but that’s certainly what I’m striving for.  So, if using Photoshop on a particular photograph makes it better ART, then I will use it.

That said, I’m still intuitively uncomfortable with the idea of doing anything in Photoshop besides messing with colors and luminosity and whatnot (e.g. inserting objects that weren’t in the scene that was photographed).  I don’t have any good reason for this, and I am open to the possibilty of becoming comfortable with this at some point, but for right now, the idea makes me uneasy.