Is photographic integrity dead?

[percepts]

It occurs to me that now so much photography is manipulated and printed digitally, that the photographers vision of what the result should look like, is based at least partly and pssibly greatly, on what they can achieve in digital manipulation which they may very well not have been able to achieve photographically. Therefore I ask, is it a lie to call a digitallly manipulated image "Fine Art Photography" when in reality it would display more integrity if it were called "Fine Art digital manipulation from a photograph". Or should we just accept that digital manipulation has something to do with photography?

[Jeremy Moore]

There never was such a thing as photographic integrity.

Where's Ken with that animated .gif?

[BetterSense]

It should be called something else entirely, and not called photography, but it's a bit late for that.

[Greg Gibbons]

So... Ansel did "fine art optical manipulation of a photograph"?

Simply accept that fine art isn't primarily representational. It's primarily art.

[Robert Hughes]

Didn't we have this same discussion about 3 weeks ago?

[clay harmon]

Oh good grief. When I see the phrase 'digital manipulation' used in a post like this, it brings only one image to my mind, and that image has nothing to do with photography and everything to do with a little onanistic self-gratification.

[theBDT]

There never was such a thing as photographic integrity.

Where's Ken with that animated .gif?

There's this one (again) on Youtube...

[percepts]

That's what I thought. Dead and buried...

[Bruce Watson]

Yawn...

[J Ney]

I can just imagine 100 years from now when 3-dimensional holographic cameras are all the rage and folks will be pining over the good ole days of 2-D digital photography with those antique Nikon D2x's.

I wonder if contact-printers in the 1800's scoffed when enlargers started becoming popular... "Look at those knuckle-heads... too lazy to carry around an 8x10 or 11x14 camera," they would say, "you lose so much resolution enlarging and it is just cheating."
Basically, technology changes with time and digital photography is photography but it is a different beast than the analog silver-gelatin photography that I practice and love. And this may get me scolded or shunned, but I still don't understand folks that go through all the time & effort of LF photography and then just throw the negatives in a scanner and fiddle with them in PS before printing them on inkjet but still consider themselves film photographers. Rather, they are smart, economical, and patient digital photographers.

At any rate, sorry for the rant but photography is photography and there are dozens of different techniques... many of us on this forum happen to be practitioners and fans of a certain type of photography. Let's not look down our noses too much.