Father Pitt is a pictorialist. That does not mean that he expects to emulate the impressionistic style of the Pictorialists like Steichen in his early days, but that the picture, in his opinion, is the thing that matters, and not how the picture was obtained. A picture ought to be judged by how it looks, and not by some theory of what photography ought to be. If you produce a pin-sharp rendition of everything in front of your lens, good for you. If you produce blurry impressionistic shapes, good for you. The question is simply whether those shapes make a picture we want to look at, or whether those sharp details belong in the picture you’ve made.

For that reason old Pa Pitt has no objection in theory to any kind of processing you put your picture through to get the result you want. The Pictorialists of 1900 would rub and scrape and torture their prints to eliminate details they thought detracted from the effect they wanted. A modern photographer can do the same with the GIMP or Photoshop or Affinity Photo.

While you have only begun to think it, Father Pitt will hasten to add that much of what people do with image-editing software is in egregiously bad taste. Most of what most people do with anything is in egregiously bad taste, so we can’t expect them to be any more tasteful with powerful image-manipulation software in front of them. One thing that could be said in favor of the old print-torturing techniques of the Pictorialists was that they took a lot of effort, and therefore automatically excluded casual fiddling. By the time you had developed the technique and the patience to manipulate pictures that way, you might have absorbed some aesthetic sense, too. But not always: see the works of William Mortensen (you can find a selection on the Photography page of Dr. Boli’s Eclectic Library) for examples of laborious print-torturing in the service of sometimes appalling taste.

For his own pictures, Father Pitt thinks of the photograph as the raw material for a picture. Most of the time he is not attempting art: he is trying to illustrate what a thing actually looks like, and the way the camera sees must be adjusted to make it match the way human brains perceive. Thus the perspective of buildings is adjusted, the highlights are darkened and the shadows lightened, and the colors are adjusted to match what the human mind naturally does when it processes a scene.

This is not what photography ought to be like. It’s only what Father Pitt does to make the pictures that suit his purposes. Some photographers set a rule for themselves that the picture must go straight from the camera to publication, and if they get good pictures that way, then they’re doing it right. Father Pitt has little patience for abstract theories of what photography ought to be. He has more opinions than anybody needs. But if you can make a good picture by ignoring every one of them, then good for you. The picture is the thing.