Let's get the major pending question out of the way right from the beginning: the idea that "straight photography" (whatever that's supposed to mean) is the only legitimate use for the tools of photography is every bit as silly and short-sighted as the idea that Abstract Expressionism is the only legitimate artistic use for paint. Both elevate mere medium to the status of Art and then claim exclusivity over that medium. Abstract Expressionism gives the paint and its method of application primacy over all else; "straight photography" revels in the idea that nearly 200 years ago humanity figured out a way to make shadows more-or-less permanent. Big, hairy deal at the time. The novelty should have worn off by now.

All art is story-telling. And you know what? Sometimes the story can be as simple as, "I saw this, and it moved me greatly." Or even, "this existed." There is nothing fundamentally wrong with an ode on the colour red, an expression of how grand or intricate nature can be, or simply fixing a memory of how your daughter looked at the age of six. But documentary is only a rudimentary use of the language of photography, and that language has progressed from pidgin to creole. There is a much larger vocabulary available now than ever before, and the grammar affords us much more than a contextually-bound, telegraphic present tense. We can spin poems, write novels, and explore "what if"—so why limit ourselves to even masterfully-written journalism?

The original incarnation of Pictorialism (and its descendants in the silver-based world) was hampered in a lot of ways. The technical difficulties involved in creating something that never was are only superficially obvious to most people today (until you've actually spent time working with needle-sharp pencils, a 6-0 sable brush or a Pasche Turbo airbrush under a loupe, you have no idea), and the act of compositing the elements was almost simple when compared to the act of capturing them. Most of what was produced was technically bad, and the only reason much of it got any attention at all was because of people's unfamiliarity with the medium: they simply didn't know how to "read" a photograph. (Can you imagine anyone today falling for the Cottingley Fairies or ectoplasm?) To do it up right required set-building, costuming, co-operative lighting, enormous amounts of tedious post-production work (with no mistakes) and staying largely within the realm of what was physically possible (poses that could be held for several seconds, etc.). As such, it was mostly concerned with "serious art" and "great ideas", but had the vocabulary of a pidgin and a grammar that relied mostly upon allusion (like the Tamarian of the Star Trek TNG episode Darmok). If you didn't know what the costumes and the assemblage meant as icons, and didn't recognise the background painting as, say, the Elysian Fields, then you could only judge the work on its own aesthetic merit—the underlying message was lost. It was very much like looking at early mediaeval painting without knowing the iconography of gesture or that that eagle over there is St. John the Evangelist.

Well, a lot more than humans and horses died in World War I. The wisdom of the elders, the classics (upon which were nursed the donkeys who led the lions to their deaths), the very gods themselves all perished in the mud of No Man's Land. Meaning lost its meaning¹, and we began to explore the very nature of meaning in Dada, Surrealism, semiotics and all of the other avenues of approach that eventually coalesced into Postmodernism. The world turned to the immediate, the now, with the feeling that the past no longer made sense and tomorrow may never come. Where nature endured, Romanticism returned to its roots with a new urgency: Nature was the Eternal that we had the power to end; we were responsible for its salvation because we would be its death otherwise, and had to learn to hold it in awe. (And make no mistake about it, Ansel Adams was no clinical realist; everything he did witheld and exaggerated in order to express his awe, in much the same way as his piano playing suffered from an excess of dynamics and rubati. He was a hopeless Romantic.)

Much of this just happened to coincide with significant advances in technology. Practical double-Gauss designs largely displaced Petzval lenses, and even later designs transformed the camera's capabilities; plates and films that were reasonably sensitive, reasonably capable of holding detail and either wide-range orthochromatic or panchromatic emerged. Not only could you take a photo that was both "real" and "now", it became much more difficult to craft a convincing fake. The work would show, and would be obvious. With enough effort, you could build the "impossible" as a set and be left with what was, for the time, minimal retouching (Dali Atomicus comes to mind), or you could try assemblage (which generally turned out looking like a painting rather than a photograph; I find "purely photographic" expressions of the concept, like Jerry Uelsmann's work, utterly unconvincing most of the time). Still, some amount of fibbing, or some story-telling skill mixed in with the reportage, has always been a good thing. There is a reason why everybody knows Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, but damned few have heard of Minor White (who could mop the floor with either of them as a camera operator and darkroom technician).

Notwithstanding the legitimacy of "straight photography", we now have the tools at our disposal to tell different kinds of stories in a truly convincing way. Some of those stories are fantasy, myth or science fiction; some explore the "why nots" rather than the "why". Do we really need to construct vast sets or haul our subjects (and a truckload of equipment) to a location, hoping for a confluence of the right light, the right weather and the moon in Capricorn in order to make the expression legitimate? Or is it merely illegitimate to use the realism of photographic reproduction of the various elements that could be photographed in expressing that story?

Don't let the fact that 90 percent of the attempts are crap bother you. That's just Sturgeon's Law in action. (Frankly, I think ol' Theodore was being a touch too generous there.) At least 90% of "straight photography" (and I mean "serious straight photography") is also crap, and digital plus "P for Professional" isn't helping there at all. So the crap is in focus and well-exposed (for some value of well-exposed). Well-told stories will still stand out; elegant poetry will still resonate deeper than a vaguely naughty limerick. Jamie Baldridge's work is more disturbing and thought-provoking as worked photographs than it ever would be as a painting; John Paul Caponigro's quiet contemplations whisper more softly, but with more enunciation.

In the end, the stories you choose to tell are your own. The idea that you can't coin a new word or phrase when it's called for, or borrow a word from another language, is an artificial imposition, whether imposed externally or internally. Nobody is forcing historians to write science fiction, but no historian has the right to say that science fiction is somehow an illegitimate expression of human thought.

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¹ How complete was the death of classical allegory and allusion? T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land was readable by most of his peers and contemporaries; kids today who study it in school need footnotes and references to look up the biblical and mythological allusions, and may have to read entire books to get to the meaning.