Back when photography was in it's infancy, the conventional wisdom was that the new medium was simply a mechanistic reproduction of reality that held no artistic merit.
But photographer John Moran noted that the intent and abilities of the photographer could transcend that view, writing in an 1865 edition of the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER:
The exercises of the artistic faculties are undoubtedly necessary in the production of pictures from nature, for any given scene offers so many different points of view; but if there is not the perceiving mind to note and feel the relative degrees of importance in the various aspects which nature presents, nothing worthy the name of pictures can be produced. It is this knowledge, or art of seeing, which gives value and importance to the works of certain photographers over all others.
