All of this is from the essay, Taking and Making in the book of essays, Each Wild Idea by Geoffrey Batchen (2002):
When is a photograph made? At what points in its production should we locate its creative and temporal boundaries? Is it when the photographer depresses the camera shutter, submitting a chosen scene to the stasis of framed exposure? Is it when the photographer singles out this exposure for printing, thereby investing a latent image with the personal significance of selection, labor, and, most crucial of all, visibility? Or is it when that image is first exposed to the public gaze, the moment when, if only by adding itself to a culture’s collective visual archive, the photograph could be said to enact some sort of residual effect? These questions are of more than academic interest; already a number of exhibitions have been organized that include photographic works never seen by those who are supposed to have “made” them.[for example, Garry Winogrand, as he points out in a footnote] So my questions immediately impinge on prevailing notions of intention, authorship, and value. But perhaps more important is the way such questions force us to consider how the making of photographs is always caught up in the complex entanglements of their own history.
Take Alfred Stieglitz’s Paula, for instance. … [Beaumont] Newhall describes the image as one in which “Stieglitz records a new, personal vision.”

[click for larger]
… Diana Emery Hulick calls Paula ”perhaps the photographer’s best known early work”: “Its technical virtuosity and modernist sensibility have earned it a well-deserved place in the history of art.” … “Paula is a turning pont in the history of the medium and in the artist’s oeuvre … It encapsulates the artist’s development from narrative to modernist and self-referential photography.” … “the image also appears to presage Stieglitz’s late work.”
Strange then that Stieglitz did not repeat this “new personal vision” or “modernist sensibility” in other work from this period.
… in the same year Stieglitz took Paula, he submitted an entirely naturalistic portrait of a young boy, very much in the spirit of Peter Henry Emerson’s aesthetic preferences, to Der Amateur Photograph, where it was published in 1890. Work made in subsequent years continued to stress atmospheric effects (as in Winter on Fifth Avenue, 1893) or poignant genre scenes caught in differential focus (The Net Mender, 1894, which Stieglitz published as “My favorite picture” in the first, 1899 issue of Photograhic Life). Although he exhibited many other photographs from this period in his Camera Club Exhibition of 1899, he did not think to include Paula. He also failed to include it in his 1913 one-person exhibition at 291 Gallery. Despite ample opportunities, he again neglected to publish Paula in either of the magazines under his control, Camera Notes or Camera Work. Nor did he publish any other examples of the hard-edged modernist sensibility that had apparently become his personal vision in 1889 — until, that is, the October 1911 issue of Camera Work which reproduced The Steerage [but not Paula] for the first time.
… From the tangle of evidence, it seems likely that Paula was taken in 1889 (although even this seems to be uncertain in Stieglitz’s own mind) but not printed until 1916, and was exhibited for the first time only in 1921.
… Much has been written about the history of The Steerage within this context, recounting how Stieglitz exposed the image in 1907 but failed to recognize its significance until 1910 (when it was rediscovered by friends), after which he published it in a 1911 issue of Camera Work and exhibited it in his one-person show of 1913. Thirty-five years later, in 1942, Stieglitz projected his theory of revelation back onto the production of this now-famous image, remembering not this inconvenient lag between its taking and making but an immediate and spontaneous vision of “shapes and underlying that a feeling I had about life.” His reminiscence stresses that he had seen the image complete in his mind’s eye before he even had his camera in his hand.
… in presenting Paula as an image prescient of his later career, Stieglitz once again claims for himself the eye of the seer; apparently he recognized significant form back in 1889, even when he was not conscious of it (even when he could not be conscious of it).
Batchen goes on to do a similar analysis of the several photographs by Australian photographer Max Dupain. Skipping to near the end of the essay:
… The point is to raise questions about the kind of history that accepts such retrospective re-creations without comment, a history that is content simply to reproduce The sunbaker [a Dupain photo] and date it 1937 and to present Paula as a work of 1889. Such histories thereby privilege the moment of taking over that of making, the private moment over the public, the origin over the journey, the aesthetic decisions over the social. At the same time, these histories deny their own role in the making of photographs (and photographers), in the establishment of certain meanings and values and the exclusion of others.
…. What this method represses, apart from the complications of actual historical evidence, is the schizophrenic identity of all photographs. As a system of representation dependent on reproduction, the photograph is capable of having many distinct physical manifestations. It is simply not appropriate for historians to treat photographs as if they are unique objects like paintings or sculptures. …
I would strongly disagree with two parts of this essay — both of which are key to its conclusion. First, he says, that Stieglitz “recognized significant form back in 1889, even when he was not conscious of it (even when he could not be conscious of it).” Stieglitz took the picture. Therefore, by definition, he was conscious of it. Photographers (and, presumably all artists) respond in many ways to the world, often not in ways that they are sure about themselves. I know I do. I experiment all the time even if I don’t use it or make it my main pursuit. It would be nuts for me to refuse to be open to different or new stimulus or new ways of seeing. Change or development of my eye takes time; it’s not instantaneous and it’s evolving constantly.
The other part that I disagree with is the suggestion that paintings and sculptures are somehow more outside of history than photographs. I don’t think that the possible taking/making gap peculiar to photography makes that true.
-Julie
http://www.unrealnature.com/