Scruton's Definition of Photography

Scruton takes a position that, I think, is self-defeating. It is such in that his definition of photography is too narrow.

Scruton claims that photography is simply the act of taking the picture. Anything that comes before or after that is the manipulation of photography, and thus not photography. The issue comes when he tries to draw his analogy to painting.

Before a painter can paint, there is some necessary prep work that MUST BE DONE. The canvas must be prepared, and perhaps primed. The paints need to be mixed while working, and even after, there is some fine editing to be done before a painting is truly complete. These, I think, would be the analogues to the preparation of a setting for a photograph and later editing on the image.

I would like to believe that Scruton does not confuse the final product of painting with the entire act of painting. If this is the case, than rejecting the analogues to the processes required to make a painting and calling this the "ideal photograph" is at best a blind mistake, and at worse manipulation of the facts, selectively ignoring facts to build a world view that is entirely independent of, and contrary to, reality.

I feel that his argument is the equivalent of comparing apples and oranges. Scruton writes off some properties of oranges, uses others to show that an orange is not an apple, and then concludes that an orange is not a fruit, but an apple is, based solely on the grounds that an orange is not an apple. This is a flawed argument to make, and discounts the properties that apples and oranges share, i.e. growing on trees, containing seeds, having an edible flesh surrounding the seeds, etc.

To end with a question: As mentioned in class, when trying to use an ideal to make a point, there is the real risk of using a wrong example and taking the essence of that as the ideal. Given this danger, is there any practical value in trying to use an ideal as the basis of an argument to discredit the real world?