Creative licence
So, you can adjust the shadows and highlights, but do anything else and your photo becomes merely a picture! (Graham Easby, Inbox, 22 August). When J.M.W. Turner painted The Fighting Temeraire he did so as a work of imagination, but we seem to have an issue with allowing that freedom to the photographer. Just because a camera can take a true likeness of something, doesn’t mean it has to. Pure photography of course has its place but that doesn’t mean there’s no room for artistic licence. For me taking the photo is just the start, and altering the picture in software completes it, making the image more abstract to emphasise the textures and colours – giving it, I hope, a more painterly quality.
Is it photography in its purest form? Of course not. Does it matter? Of course not. I remember an anecdote of the guitarist
Allan Holdsworth; when asked if using a synthaxe (a guitar synthesizer) was really in the spirit of guitar playing, he answered, ‘But did you like the music it made?’ And that’s really the only thing that matters: do you like the end result? How you get there is purely academic and shouldn’t in uence our response to an image.
Colin Avery