I recently spoke to a photography club and, in preparation, was reviewing some materials I've collected over the years that disucuss different aspects of the medium. I planned to talk about what makes a photograph work and wanted to draw an important distinction between the photograph as a document and the photograph as artistic expression.
In a back issue of Aperture magazine (#186) I found an interview with photographer Stephen Shore who, I think, summed it up perfectly:
Some regard the photograph as a finger pointing at content and not a creative expression in itself. That's the distinction between a photograph and an illustration. I guess what it comes down to is: an illustration is aiming the camera at the direction of some content, while the photograph is making sense of it.
