Paraphrase.

"a paraphrase conveys the essential thought expressed in a source text — if necessary, at the expense of literality"

I like thinking of photography in terms of paraphrase - for a medium where it is common to see near-literal, or documentary, representations of the photographed subject, I'm on the side that tends more towards making a photographic image look how you want it to look, rather than have it appear as things actually were at the time the image was taken. I'm not advocating full-on fabrication necessarily - while I usually don't post-process to the ultimate limit, I don't really have a problem with others doing that. But my approach to my own image-making is to tend toward an anti-literal stance - to take some artistic license with the overall appearance.

I have observed in some photography forums that opinions seem to be divided on this point. For some, images that aren't "literal" aren't photographs. "Digital art" is used to simply name the genre sometimes, but can be hurled as a slur at other times. For others, photography is a way to use your camera (and other tools, including post-processing software) to create something unique and uniquely expressive of the photographer's personal aesthetic. The borders demarcating depicted reality with this group are more fluid, and in a way more forgiving.

I believe - and I don't think I'm saying anything particularly earth-shattering here - that even the most "literal" and straightforward image isn't really "true". All that a camera sees isn't all we can see; no photograph is truly literal.

So, there are my random musings on image-making and literality, for what it's worth.

Here are some paraphrased views of Black-Eyed Susans taken throughout the summer of last year.