Well, in it's STRICTEST form, photography means writing down light. As far as I know, there's only been a few instances that would qualify as truly "pure" photography, and they occurred when the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima was so bright it burned the shadows of those in front of it into nearby surfaces:
Everything else is manipulating light to create an image. To me, it's the result that matters. Even colors and filters don't really matter, because you can distort light however you wish. To me, it only transfers from photography to image manipulation when you ADD or REMOVE subjects that weren't originally there. As long as the image comes from bouncing radiation off something that was in front of some sort of imaging medium, what you do with that radiation after it's been captured is, to me, irrelevant.