Buried in the prefatory note of this 1905 anthology is a claim so casually stated that it's easy to miss — but it captures a battle that took photography more than sixty years to win. Charles Holme, editor of the influential London art journal The Studio, wrote:

The camera has ceased to be the master and has become, as it should be, an instrument more and more controlled by the mind of the individual who manipulates it.

To modern eyes this sounds like a truism. Of course the photographer controls the camera. But in 1905, this was a fighting sentence. For most of the nineteenth century, the dominant view — held by critics, painters, and even many photographers — was that the camera was a mechanical recorder, not an artistic instrument. It captured what was in front of it; the operator merely pointed. Charles Baudelaire had famously dismissed photography in 1859 as the "refuge of failed painters."

Holme is doing something clever here. Rather than argue that photography is art in the abstract, he offers a historical retrieval — pointing to D. O. Hill, a Royal Scottish Academician who in 1843 turned to the calotype process to help him paint a group portrait containing 430 faces:

Mr. Hill was a member of the Royal Scottish Academy, and in the year 1843, at the suggestion of his friend, Sir John Herschel, made use of the, then, new process of photography to aid him in the painting of a picture in which no less than 430 portraits had to be included... he will probably be known in the future as the father of artistic photography.

This is the forgotten origin story of every wedding photographer, every Instagram influencer, every AI-image prompter alive today. Hill wasn't trying to make art with a camera — he was using it as a reference tool for painting, the way a 2026 concept artist might use Midjourney to block out a composition. But the portraits he produced as by-products were so striking that he became, in Holme's phrase, "the father of artistic photography."

Holme's prediction has aged remarkably well. Hill and his collaborator Robert Adamson are now recognized as pioneers, their calotypes hang in the National Galleries of Scotland, and the argument Holme was fighting — is photography art? — was decisively settled. Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and the Photo-Secessionists that Holme was quietly championing became the canonical answer.

What's newly relevant is the framing. Every debate about whether AI image generation is "real art" replays Holme's argument almost word for word. The critics say: the machine did it, not you. The defenders say, as Holme did: the instrument is controlled by the mind of the individual who manipulates it. If history is any guide, the tool wins. It just takes about sixty years.