Confused about Photography?

I am taking part in Sierro Metro’s pop-up school run by Travis Souza this month - ‘Doers and/or of Doings’, I shall elaborate on this further at a later date. This involves a series of tasks given allocated to me by other artists to fit into my day to day life and work. Some of these are a little strange -documenting a 70s dinner party, making a short film to a recipe involving things like a fish tank, but there are also a few less bizarre tasks - readings etc. The first was called ‘Photography as Representational Art’ written in 1986 by Robert Wicks.

I always try and sum up an article in a sentence or two to formulate/clarify it in my mind. I then analyse it to see how I may apply it to my work. The summery I came up with goes something like this:

Photography’s inherent link to a ‘presentness’ results in the sacrifice of the opportunity for total fiction offered by other representational art forms. This required ‘presentness’ however, when linked with relevant technical manipulation is what in fact makes a photograph a representational piece of art.

(For this to make sense it is obviously necessary to read the whole article)
Obviously a lot of the discussion on manipulation of the medium (or limitations within this manipulation) are now obsolete due to technological advancements. The link to presentness however will always be the essence of photography. We can photoshop indefinitely but the initial photograph will always be a static capture of something. This confused me somewhat and merely chose to clarify photography in my mind as a tool for documentation rather than a piece of work in its own right. This is not to eliminate that photograph becoming a piece of work but that is up to how the artist chooses to elevate it. The article left me bemused, it seemed to argue the case for photography as a tool for manipulation while discussing it as a representational art form. I still somehow think that I will continue to use photography a tool of manipulation rather than creation.