Every photograph is a fake from start to finish.
Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things.
When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration.
When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself.
Art for art's sake is dead, if it ever lived.
A good daguerreotype was as perfect a kind of photograph as was ever made.