To say that we are just glorified documentarians is a bit extremist. (and have you ever met an extremist who had a flexible viewpoint?) It is a terribly short-sighted perspective, and ultimately a very limiting one.

Sure, we can break something down to its base components and make it seem mundane. It isn’t. It is art because we can take a photograph of an everyday scene and show it to a hundred people and get a hundred different reactions. A photo can evoke emotion from its viewer, and it can also allow all the people in the world to see something that was previously only seen by one person: the photographer, the artist.

Being a photographer doesn’t make you an artist, but it also doesn’t give you a right to say the rest of us are not.

Photography is not simply capturing what is already there, it is selecting just the right moment to capture, from the right angle, under the right level of light with there right settings of film, camera, development and post processing.

You can take a scientific approach, but that would be like tuning middle “C” on a piano to exactly 440Hz. Technically correct but very cold compared to the warm sound of a grand piano that’s slightly off perfect and layered with rich harmonics.

Photography can certainly be documentary, but equally artistic, depending upon the bent of the photographer.

Secondly: Photography is just a medium, in the same way that canvas and a brush are. Neither is art without creative input from the artist. Sounds like he/she was trolling you Brian.

What I find far more interesting is the way that photography (before post-processing) is actually a reversal of conventional art like painting and sculpture. For us the manipulation and creativity is in the setup of the scene (specially for artificial light photography) the camera just captures the light that’s there, but the DOF, light angles and ratios, composition are all chosen before the click.

Ironically, conventional art, the creative process happens WithinTheClick, which is extended from a moment to an extended period wherein the artist interprets and creates the scene.

Another interesting spin off to your troll’s argument is that almost all pop musicians can’t call themselves artists, because they don’t write their own songs. Likewise as a painting / sculpture becomes more lifelike it becomes less of an artwork, and more of an historical record.