Hi there.
Love your reply. I appreciate your grace in the conversation. As a teacher I suspect we both acknowledge that a lot of unlearning has to occur for better learning to surface. So we're kind of after the same result even if the route is not the same.
1. Calling into question the essential nature of art is definitely the heart of the matter. I reflect just on the wording "can a photograph be art?" and the answer is without debate yes -- but the explanation may not be something a lot of people understand or even agree with and in both cases it traces back to what has been learned (or not) from experience.
2. I think we have to stipulate that anyone who used a camera to make an image can be called a photographer. But of course anyone who can heat raw food is not a chef, and just saying "photographer" doesn't have much depth in its actual meaning. Riffing on your take, I would say that being an artist seems to correlate more highly to being educated than does simply being a photographer. But being an artist who is a photographer certainly doesn't in any way mean that one is likely less educated (visually literate) than a painter is. More to your point, I suspect, the likelihood that some random person is a photographer instead of a painter is very high, because using a camera is so simple compared to manually manipulating material for producing an image relying on figurative fidelity (i.e., illustration). For these people, I don't think it's so much magical belief as it is confidence in mechanical automation to conveniently produce "good enough" results for their purposes.
3. Every picture taken with an exposure less than a quarter second is a "snap" shot. And a master calligrapher can stroke an exceptionally beautiful mark just as fast. But the calligrapher's exceptionally resonant mark was of course years in the making, developing the sensibility, the technique, the discipline, the understanding of selective use of space, emphasis, etc. Most photographers can snap away and satisfy themselves. But most will fail utterly at shooting a sports event where the images -- all snapshots -- have to be compelling for an audience. They'll fail because they haven't and don't exercise the labor that goes into being good enough to get a great result -- a result from being good enough to execute the right way at the right time. Regardless of all that, you hit the nail on the head by saying that the issue is in how tradition is a mold that can be broken. Tradition is learned culture, and in no other way is *definitive* of a medium.
4. Having worked for archaeologists, I can't say that your idea of all artifacts always being symbolic holds water. They do all, however, acquire meaning through interpretations drawn via a given context. Changing the interpretive context can easily change their meaning. So yes, found photographs can have artistic merit despite how and why they were taken. But that doesn't make photography radically different as an art. Every artwork is to some degree auto-expressive. But even at a high degree, that is only half of the communication. The audience has to supply the other half, the half that comprehends what is sent, that can decode the form, that can process the data. Visual illiteracy is, more than any camera or photograph, the reason why some people "contest" the entire medium, photography, in terms of some traditionally limited code they accept for recognizing some other non-photographic type of artifact. Paint accidentally spilled on a canvas does not automatically make the item "a painting" nor "art" but someone might find art in experiencing it and put it in a frame on a wall and call it both painting and art. Photography is not artistically radical; but it can be exotic to a tradition-bound visual illiterate; and an assertion that it is art can be a radical experience for that individual.
