Cem it's not my definition. It comes from the man who invented the word photography and told us unambiguously what he mean by it. And so things remained for the next 150 years or so.
I accept this! Although I'd offer that what's going on is writing with electrons, since that what light does on all photosensitive surfaces. The light energy is absorbed by matter, kicking out an outer electron which them is somehow stored locally and the distribution of the electrons gets somehow translated to areas of brightness varying roughly with the intensity of the incident light.
In analog sensitive media, the ejected electron gets captured at first by some chemical and then that leads to a state which can be made to look different than material which has not received that electron. With film, it's easy to say that this is true photography. With silica based sensitive material, the discrete area of a pixel can only respond a little, more or a lot, but quite faithfully represent the number of electrons arriving into that small area. With film, however, the size of the writing area is much finer, down to the minutest beginning grain level. Unlike the sensel, a well sensitive to incident light and expressing radiation only proportionally with one value, "intensity", for that small area, film also records "character". The latter, a mechanical rigid cell cannot do. So, to be truthful, the drawing in a silicon sensor, if we except the word "Photography" for this substrate too, is really an array of single quality drawings with no other characteristics. Each can only be one uniform level of gray, all the way from deep black to the brightest white. There's no detail or nuance possible below that level of resolution. Moreover, the junctions between these compartments of a latent image are abrupt and therefore the gradualness of shading has to be simulated mathematically. If we'd accept just the gray dots of the individual cells of the silicon surface, then perhaps one could call this drawing, albeit, "punctate". So this would be "punctate photography". What still has to happen with digital imaging is that these compartments have to be "smudged" somehow to get a smooth picture and then edges have to be "discovered" and sharpened again. If we add color recovery, then that's even more estimating by the software. The fact image reconstruction is done so well is an proof of the brilliance of engineers, not of the nature of the process being "graphic".
Only analog imaging, classical photography involves recording a projected image in continuous form in a flat plane, with no interference in continuity, from one locus to another in the latent image. So it's quite fair to see that only this process is actually photography.
Still, one could argue that when we draw with a pencil, we have to use
repeated strokes to build an image.
Wikipedia: 18th Century Artist using a camera obscura to outline his subject.
The
camera obscura was appreciated since the time of Aristotle, who conceived from that the idea that light travels in straight lines. The portrait artist could use a projected image of a sitting subject and "graphed" the person using the projection on to paper as the guide. So the fact that today's silicon chips makes repeated grey dots of different intensities in it's method of "drawing" could be considered an extension of the multiple strokes and cross hatching needed with pencil drawings.
In Orthodox tradition, Jewish families can't have milk with meat, (perhaps an insult to the very purpose of milk), so, after a meat dinner, there's "Parev" ice cream, which contains no milk! When someone is offered "ice cream, no one denounces the obvious fraud. Everyone's happy and it's delicious!
We've arrived at that situation with film. The silver in the sewers is toxic for the environment. Darkroom fumes have been a source of health problems for more than a few photographers. So, the punctate silicon drawing substitute, gets to be called "Photography" too even though it cannot really make continuous tones without a lot of mathematics.
So Maris, you are absolutely right and Cem is also right by modern convention. But how can you both be right? Well that's right as well! They cannot, but we have to live with it.
One thing is for sure, without digital representation, film photography would be less known that it is!
Asher
Asher