Photography is often stuck in an imitation of painting, at least for the composition and lighting parts, while at the same time, being subjected to a hate campaign directed toward post-processing and alterations. That sounds paradoxical to me. You realize that painting is 100% post-processing ? It’s very fake.
I don’t like lyrical definitions of art. First of all, I suspect the little art education most people have is only masterpieces from schoolbooks, so in their heads, art == masterpieces. Visit any small town museum, you will quickly get a sense that it’s only a survivor bias : most art is shit. It’s still art though. Bad people are still people. Bad art is still art. Art is the nature of the thing, not its property or quality.
Art is whenever a medium meets someone’s intent to produce a result conveying that intent. The medium and the tooling to achieve that is irrelevant. Art and sex are the last things we can do only for the sake of doing it. Everything else needs an external motive, a good reason, sometimes even an excuse.
We can redo pictures in post. In fact, whole movies are done in-computer, so why not photographs ? Who cares what should be done in post and what should be done on stage ? Whatever works… With physically-accurate algos, the light on the scene is equal to the light in the computer, whatever you couldn’t do on stage can be simulated in post. Have you seen videogames lately ? They simulate whole worlds real-time with almost photo-realistic perfection. Plus they have better color management than any photo editing software commercially available.
When doing analog, most of the final rendition (contrast and colors) is imposed by the film + paper combination. You may control the content, but hardly the look. Color film imposes its color signature on you, that is, film manufacturers decide what is beautiful for you. With digital, you get/have to build you very own film emulsion yourself. What an improvement ! You now have full control over the expressive palette. See how movies use color grading to setup a mood ?
Yet photographers are still trapped in endless discussions on what is true photography, or - if I may translate - what sorts of difficulties we may invent ourselves to keep it a difficult thus noble art in a time where everything seems so simple that it may have lost any value.
Well, value is in ideas and results. Use paint, pencils, clay, 3D software, virtual darkroom, whatever, but be aware that it will most likely end up as a matrix of pixels somewhere over the web, so why not take advantage of that in the first place ?
Film is only a look.
In terms of pp the skin in that bathing photo is very well judged.
