It was a joke but we still want to hear the cool explanation.
Yay!
So. In a nutshell. Our understanding of photography lies on several axises. The big ones are art, science, mechanics and education. It goes without saying that this is an analytical observation, and that most photography uses, even without knowing, those axis. Example for pictures that were taken with only scientific purposes is mostly medical photography. Tons of the first photographs were nature photographs, for purely scientific purpose. I don't think you'll find anyone who thinks they hold artistic value: they were experiments.
Art/Science are the big axises to understand how we understand photography directly, but not the only ones. The non-direct ways are important too. Mechanics is the "child" of the science axis, but its focus is on the camera, not the subject of the photograph. Using photography for educational purposes requires a lot, mostly trust that the machine and the artist/mechanist knows how to use one and their goals are "pure". It lays against all of those axises.
Now, let's say there's one truth everyone is after, like Victorian science thought (just a reminder: that's before theory of relativity). There are still few ways to look at it, and this is the value aspect. Science axis lays on the notion that there is One True Truth. Art, the same, but the tactic is using the artist's values to get to that truth. In some discourses, what I'm referring to as value is the representation.
So unless wanting a very specific medical photography, we expect a lot from it: showing reality (truth) in a pretty way (value). This really isn't the case, and you can rarely wrap all of your expectations to one single photograph.
That's it, basically. But one of the cool parts of my paper will be about ghosts: x-rays were discovered with the progression of photography, and for about 40 years, people were trying to photograph ghosts. Photography had to find a way to distinguish between ghosts and mortals, this world and the next and answering some epistemological questions about the nature of proof, identity and knowledge during this time.
I'm very tired; I hope that was coherent enough.