PHOTOGRAPHER ED FREEMAN is working on a book about surfing, though he's never surfed a day in his life. A couple of years ago, while shooting stock in Hawaii, he stumbled upon some surfers on the North Shore of Oahu. He was blown away by the "athleticism, the intimate relationship with nature, and the inherent danger of it all," he says. "I knew I wanted to do something that was art, not sports photography. I wanted the pictures to be about how surfing feels to me. Not how it is."

Freeman readily admits the images he created were "Photoshopped halfway to death." He spent hours on his computer, crafting the skies, combining different pictures of waves, and in one instance stitching together a Frankensurfer out of multiple riders. Two of the finished products won awards in an annual contest judged by Photo District News, a leading professional-photography publication.

When I was the photo editor at Outside, earlier this decade, I used to look through PDN winners for photos to publish. I'm a freelancer now, but I'm still excited to see the selections. When I first viewed Freeman's photos this past June, I was blown away. I should have caught on that they were composites—there are some obvious clues, like overly brooding skies and myopic lighting—but I didn't. I saw surfers riding 20-foot-tall freight trains of water and thought, These are amazing. Then I went to Freeman's Web site and saw his disclaimer about making art images. So I did what people do these days: I posted one of his photos on my blog, aphotoeditor.com.

Commenters immediately blasted Freeman, claiming he'd betrayed the sport by ginning up a photo that supposedly captures an authentic athletic achievement. Freeman replied with his own comments, shrugging off the criticism, and when I called him recently he remained unapologetic. "I'm an artist," he told me. "I'm interested in creating great pictures, not documentary images. I couldn't care less if they're 'real' or not."

That's a common defense in cases like this, and a reasonable point of view. But it fails to take into account that the value of manufactured pictures is intrinsically tied to the authentic shots that came first. No matter how forthright one is about alterations, fake photos cause collateral damage. They devalue the work of photographers with the skills and patience to capture awing images in real time. Even worse, modern photo manipulation is seriously screwing up our concept of reality and our willingness to believe what we see in magazines like Outside.

Of course, truth in photography has always been fuzzy. The old trope "The camera never lies" is, in fact, backwards—the camera always lies. Since the birth of the medium, photographers have been crafting their images with lens selection, film type, and all manner of darkroom tricks.

"Photographs have always been tampered with," says Hany Farid, a computer-science professor at Dartmouth College who works with federal law-enforcement agencies on digital forensics. "It's just that the digital revolution has made it much easier to create sophisticated and compelling fakes." Farid keeps a greatest-hits list of forgeries online, which includes a photograph of Abraham Lincoln from around 1860 that's actually a composite: Lincoln's head propped on southern politician John Calhoun's body.

In the late 19th century, photographers were intent on proving that their images deserved a place in galleries alongside paintings. Like Ed Freeman, these "pictorialists" espoused the practice of manipulating photographs to achieve artistic intent. In 1932, in response to this movement, a group that included Ansel Adams formed f/64 to champion "straight" photography. Ironically, Adams was known to be a master of dodging and burning (i.e., lightening and darkening), darkroom techniques that allowed him to produce a print reflecting his vision for what the photograph should be.