Maris,
Your writing on what makes a print a photograph is a valuable challenge and addresses our need to question how we promote prints made without use of a light sensitive substrate.
I think a photograph becomes fine art in time.
This, Maris is consistent with my ideas and your now justify durability to survive the critical process of selection as history unfolds its view.
A photograph is a surface bearing picture forming marks as a consequence of being penetrated by light. Everything made by Louis Daguerre, Ansel Adams, and Diane Arbus, (and millions of their contemporaries) has this extraordinary quality but most pictures do not.
Given the wide variety of substrates, photosensitive chemicals, fixation and presentation, photographs made without silicon chips, vary amongst themselves so much. Such extreme variation is not seen between a glossy color photograph produced in the wet darkroom on an Epson pigment print on fine glossy paper. The eye, at normal viewing distances cannot distinguish the difference in many cases. So the evidence of penetration is hardly discernible in the process of enjoying the picture, however the glossy fine gallery image is made. A photography curator, of course might recognize the tell-tale richness in saturation of green, for example and say this is an Epson print, but that hardly segregates the simple print from a from a purist's "fine art" photograph. To me what's important is honesty. A Cynaotype should be labeled as such but not something off an HP printer toned to look like the Cyanotype crafted print. I really don't know how people come to use with "Chromogenic Print" out of context. It should apply just to papers which had in it 3 layers of chemicals for the colors. However, it's also used for inkjet prints since it uses colored dyes or pigments. So there does seem to be some obfuscation, where gallery artists and their promoters try to make it appear that the picture is made other than by a computer device and without "writing with light" to make the print. Prints that are stamped out, each uniform, are something hard to reconcile with an artists pulsating imagination and last minute changes. I myself value a work more if it had the artist's fingerprints on it and each print was not in fact identical.
And it is a pervasive error in modern critical thought to suppose a photograph is any picture that includes "light hitting a sensor" or a "sensor capturing an image" somewhere in its chain of manufacture. All pictures, whatever the medium, paintings and drawings included, have the sensor/image interaction deep in their engine room.
As long as the image is stored as a result of a photon interaction with a specific chemical and throwing off an electron who's numbers cause an accumulation of density proportional to the flux of light, to me the latent image so recorded is a latent photograph.
In fact, if we wished, we could coat the sensor with silver gelatin after the fact and devise a system to have the electrons released forward rather then taken away by the AD convertors at the rear of the photocells. We just happen not to do it that way.
Still we can reassemble all those photon intensities and send the light back with a laser beam to film or paper and process the old-fashioned way by hand or in a machine. In each of these cases, I believe, a genuine photograph is made. It can be labelled "Silver Gelatin Print", for that's what it is!
Where the photographer uses a digital camera and crafts the potential print on the computer screen with classic sensitivity and craft, then when outstanding and individually made, even as an Epson print, these should be recognized as genuine photography and even fine art, but labeled as "8 pigment print on Baryta", something honest and not "Chromogenic Print" or some other disguise.
Asher