Photographer has become a vague term in recent decades. It is a title many claim but it no longer describes what they do.
A famous Australian "photographer" eschews camera work and all the other stuff and just barks at the studio workers, models, lighting and sets guys, camera wranglers, and lab staff to hurry up and make her famous pictures so she can sign them.
A famous French "photographer" gains an international reputation by wearing out Leicas with thousands of exposures (expose, no develop, no fix) without ever making a lookable picture.
An obscure French lab worker makes thousands of the most famous and revered photo-journalist photographs in history. He does this in order to make visible the results of the blind camera clicking by the famous guy in the previous paragraph. The pictures are certainly photographs but is the lab guy who made them (expose, develop, fix) a photographer?
Maybe the way out is to claim a title that describes the last thing you do in the chain of production that results in a photograph. Recalling the above examples one could say "photographic director", "cameraman", "photograph maker".
We probably don't need a new word; just honest use of the words we already have. If we are too slack with the word "photographer" we could end up with a situation foreshadowed in a recent delightful thread on APUG: can a cat be a photographer?