AMONGST MANY IDEAS IN HIS ESSAY, The Thing Itself ~ The fundamental principle of photography, there was one idea I found to be quite accurate and appropriate:
"...photographers are photographers one hundred per cent of the time, even when washing dishes."
That brilliant notion aside, Jay builds his case, re; the preeminence of the the thing itself, upon "the medium's inseparable relationship to The Thing Itself...Photography performs one function supremely well: it shows what something or somebody looked like, under a particular set of conditions at a particular moment in time". A function which he labels as "photography's boon as well as its bane.
Jay and I pretty much agree on that score. Especially the boon as well as bain part - although, iMo, emphasis should be placed on the bain part cuz ...
...when it comes to the medium's struggle to gain acceptance as an Art, its ability to faithfully record "what something or somebody looked like, under a particular set of conditions at a particular moment in time" was the primary impediment to acceptance.
That is to write, the medium's one function [that it does] supremely well created a prevailing picture making paradgm in which what you photograph is usually more important than how you photograph it. An idea which stands at odds with the Art World.
It was not until the medium began its climb out of its emphasis on the what-round about the late 60s / early 70s-that the Art World began to consider photography as a viable medium for making Art. At that time, photographers began to eschew what they had been told was a good picture and begin to make pictures of what they saw and in doing so they began to embrace tenets of the Aesthetic Movement ...
The aesthetic movement was a late nineteenth century movement that championed pure beauty and ‘art for art’s sake’ emphasising the visual and sensual qualities of art and design over practical, moral or narrative considerations.
iMo, it was as this point that the how you photograph-with emphasis on the visual and sensual qualities of art and design over narrative considerations-broke free of the constraints of the what you photographed. Photographers who were sensitive to the visual and sensual qualities of Art were free to make pictures of how they saw/see the world.
Simply put, the how began to take precedence over the what. And, the Art World took notice.