Originally Posted by
Tannin
Is it ethical to present your audience with a glossed-up, unrealistic view of the world so that you can sell your pictures, and ignore the fact that you are distorting their view of reality and making them frustrated, unappreciative, and unhappy?
To see this graphically, watch any random TV series (yes, moving pictures, but the point still holds). The people in that series are, on average, a lot younger, slimmer, better-dressed and better looking than real people, their homes are better furnished, their cars are cars that most people can't afford. Result: most ordinary people think that they are too fat, too poor, too ugly, and well behind the eight-ball of the average. This is why people burn themselves out working two jobs and going on stupid diets and having pointless cosmetic surgery and all the rest of it. Simply, because our communicators (photographers and others) lie to us all the time.
Similarly, we photographers constantly strive to add more "pop" to our landscapes with too much saturation, clever multi-exposures, and a whole host of Photoshop tricks. We lie about what stuff looks like because it's an easy way to get our pictures noticed, and, over time, the cumulative effect of all our little lies is that the people who see our work (if they pay attention to it at all) wind up with an untrue picture of some fantasy world and, when they see the real world with their own eyes, it is pale and unattractive. Worse, they then feel impelled to "improve" it, and nearly everything you can do to a block of good, natural land to make it look more "photogenic" destroys a part of it. Nature is messy! But photographers like us pretend it isn't, and in consequence people don't understand it, and so they destroy it in a misguided attempt to "improve" it.
There is a fine line between presenting an attractive view of your subject, showing it in its best light on the one hand, and telling lies about it on the other hand. The ethical photographer thinks hard about this line quite often, and does his best to stay on the right side of it.