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Though photographers have always used lighting, hair, makeup and darkroom tricks to create glamour, what passes for beautiful in ads today has changed dramatically because of the advent of Photoshop, says Dartmouth College’s Hany Farid, a computer science professor who studies photo manipulation. Advertisers, he says, “have been playing a very dirty game.” He sees the modern retouching aesthetic as moving toward a Barbie doll ideal for women and G.I. Joe for men. “They know they’re crossing the line. I think they’re starting to see the writing on the wall.

If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether….its true duty..is to be the servant of the sciences and arts – but the very humble servant, like printing or shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented literature….

What I would say to that is that what’s happening with mainstream photography is that it’s becoming much more about experience than documenting. It’s about sharing current experience and rather than creating a document for record there is something very different about posting an image on Facebook and either making an album of your family that sits around for years, or creating a document in a journalistic archive such as Questions Without Answers which is then referenced as evidence of history. Posting images on Facebook becomes this stream where tomorrow it’s gone, in the next hour even it’s gone. It’s just about participating in the moment so it’s a very different form of coverage. But again it doesn’t replace the old.