ANDREAS GURSKY, RHEIN II

This picture taken by Andreas Gursky has just become the most expensive photograph in the world, selling at Christies for $4.3 million. I like the photo, it's quite compelling, but then I read this....

In fact the artist carefully digitally removed any intrusive features – dog walkers, cyclists, a factory building – until it was bleak enough to satisfy him.

So does that still make it a photograph? Or is now a piece of art using a photograph? I mean it's not a picture snapped at the perfect moment, one that can never be recreated again is it? Because I could probably create an extremely similar photo using programmes that alter digital pics. I in fact just entered 4 photographs into a photo competition and two of those were digitally altered but they had to be labelled as such. In fact they were entered into the digitally altered photograph section of that comp. If one of them should win it will be the "best digitally altered photograph" in that comp. So maybe this should be referred to from now on as the worlds most expensive digitally altered photograph and if that is the case, holy shit why the frack would you spend $4.3 million dollars on a digitally altered photograph?