This, of course, gives us our 'art for art sake' and to the expressiveness of the individual artist. From this angle, if a subject of a photograph maintains an indexical claim to his or her image, then the artist photographer loses total claim to the creative process. When the referent persists, resisting transcendence, the photographic work of art becomes entailed, it is forever contingent. This will not do, and such a relationship must be brushed aside or, more likely, simply ignored. This is where 'art photography' seems mainly to be at this moment.
Many processes are available to relieve a photograph of any recalcitrant ties to the world.
The possibilities are many. But the top of the list and the most talked about is the manipulation of photographic material by way of computer processing. The possibilities are limitless and I shall not go into them for I am sure you are familiar with what can be done. The original act of taking a photograph is merely the procurement of an image to be processed. This is a far cry from Edward Weston's belief that you should 'pre-visualize' the final print in the ground glass of your camera.