I've long admired the early photographic work of John Goto up to the early 1980s before his turn to painting and then to montage in Terezin marked the end of his "straight" photography. Goto's more recent West End Blues: Jazz Migrants in London, 1919-74 makes very extensive use of Photoshop. His work is concerned with the relationship between the past and the present.

Nancy Roth, in her commentary in Flusser Studies on West End Blues says of these digitally constructed images from photography that:

To many who have studied, worked and taught in institutions of photographic education and exhibition over the past twenty years, these minutely constructed images seem distinctly alien. They are complex and ambiguous. They demand sustained attention. They address the past, but are emphatically in the present. In openly asserting their relationship to Photoshop, in referring to multiple texts, in their use – sometimes – of highly saturated colour beloved of certain schools of commercial design, they often skirt a very sensitive boundary between art and advertising. They plant a disturbing suspicion among us that our understanding of “photography” has limits, and that there could be others. The usual first response of natives is to withhold “citizenship,” i.e., to deny Goto’s work the status of photography.

Roth says that the combination of “window and “mirror,” recalls the title of John Szarkowski’s now canonical text, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960. In it, the two terms form the central pillars of a powerful, comprehensive and in many ways durable definition photography as a whole, a way of encompassing what belongs to the field and of excluding what does not. Szarkowski own basic definition of photography is:

More convincingly than any other kind of picture, a photograph evokes the tangible presence of reality. Its most fundamental use and its broadest acceptance has been as a substitute for the subject itself – a simpler, more permanent, more clearly visible version of the plain fact. Our faith in the truth of a photograph rests on our belief that the lens is impartial, and will draw the subject as it is, neither nobler nor meaner. This faith may be naïve and illusory (for though the lens draws the subject, the photographer defines it), but it persists. The photographer’s vision convinces us to the degree that the photographer hides his hand.