The main concern of analytic philosophers who have written about still photography has been to characterize the nature of the causal link between object photographed and photographic image and to argue that this causal link represent the essence of photography. A particular kind of a realist aesthetic has been built around this causal link.

A recent survey of philosophical writing on the aesthetics of photography by Greg Currie ('Photography, Aesthetics of', in E. Craig (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7.1998), for example, concentrated exclusively on the question of the relation between photography's mechanicity and its alleged transparency to its objects arising from the optico-chemical causal link between a photograph and what it is of.

The realist argument (eg., André Bazin in his essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, Stanley Cavell in The World Viewed, Roger Scruton's ‘Photography and Representation’ and Kendall Walton's ‘Transparent Pictures’) is that my photograph of Suzanne doesn't just look like her: it is somehow closer, or more intimately connected, to the her than a drawing or painting could be. These photographs do not involve significant intentional input and are therefore in some sense objective.

Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, a way that could not satisfy painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction. Photographs, because of their optico-chemical origins, are transparent to what they represent.

Photographs are more like mirrors than they are like paintings. photographs, because of their optico-chemical origins, are transparent to what they represent. Scruton drew the obvious conclusion from the transparency thesis: ---photographs are transparent to their objects, and so are not themselves of aesthetic interest.

The obvious flaw with this kind of reasoning is that a photograph shows us ‘what we would have seen’ at a certain moment in time, from a certain point if we kept our head immobile and closed one eye and if we saw things with the equivalent of a 150-mm or 24-mm lens and if we saw things in Portra NC and printed on paper or published on the web. So we have the photographer's interpretative role in photographic picture-making and photographs don't show us precisely what our eyes would have seen.