hi don
I understand what you are saying but what happens when you take a photograph of a house
and after you get the film processed its a photograph of a bird building a nest ..
it has more to do with people confusing what they see in a photograph with what really happened.
https://www.photrio.com/forum/media/forest-and-sun.61655/
the photograph was made with a box camera, and none of this was there...
Well, I didn't say "taking a photo of a house" -- I just said a photo of a house. "Taking a photo" is a different thing altogether -- it's obviously an activity, someone is doing it somehow, its aspect is vague, and the result (photo) may not be anything recognizable from the activity that generated it (at least not by an audience and possibly not by the photographer). But the end result is the end result - unless you change it, then there's a subsequent end result. Things can always change.
As for people confusing the content of a photo (content can be flushed out in a thousand different ways) and the supposed reality behind it - often the photographic content is the only available reality. That is the power of documentary photography: its ability to generate the reality of a situation for an audience. It's also the reason people sometimes don't trust documentary photography.
At the very least, even straightforward art photography is representative of something - but it's usually "reality, as seen by" - not retouched but discriminated.