“The next great photographers—if there are to be any—will have to find a way to reclaim photography’s special link to reality. And they’ll have to do it in a brand-new way.”

The last art form to be tethered to realism, its factual validity has lately been manipulated and pixelated to the point of extinction.

How is that even remotely possible? The medium certainly looks alive, well and, if anything, overpopulated. There are hordes of photographers out there, working with back-to-basics pinhole cameras and pixeled images measured in gigabytes, with street photography taken by cell phones and massive photo “shoots” whose crews, complexity and expense resemble those of movie sets. Step into almost any serious art gallery in Chelsea, Santa Monica or Mayfair and you’re likely to be greeted with breathtaking large-format color photographs, such as Andreas Gefeller’s overhead views of parking lots digitally montaged from thousands of individual shots or Didier Massard’s completely “fabricated photographs” of phantasmagoric landscapes.

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Personally I don’t think that manipulating, editing and modifying images is killing photography as an art form. It’s been like that from the very beginning.
What is your opinion, do you think photography is dead?