We are here in a time when most people who make photographs are basically unaffected by Sontag, and that includes most art photographers. And the anxiety over photographic mechanicals is a red herring; no one believes that a microphone transmitting sensory information renders the input of composed music unartistic. Nor does printmaking necessarily make something that is unartistic into what we still call "fine" art. And finally, all communication frames. That's why it works.

Almost all of Sontag's critique was significant as a retrospective of prevailing general understandings at that time -- now antiquated. Almost none of it actually pertains as forward thinking to how the work done by a photographer - most of it done with the mind and the eye (blending perception, concepts, and memory) before an exposure is made -- is why the resulting image can be art. But "images", like sentences, are neither inherently artistic nor do they need to be. Some are, intentionally. Some are not. The scope of photography's affective power is no less than that of language.