Good Lord, mhv, I don't know about you, but Cohen and Meskin really do clear things up!!
Seems a proper photograph uniquely provides "egocentric spatial information about the object", whereas a painting does not, and that is the difference between the two. But then they started epistemologically blathering about the location of the depictum (which all this time I thought was in the neighborhood of my large intestine) and allocentric location (which I thought was having one's head up one's ass) and seeing doxastically ( which sounds rather dirty) and exactly where on the earth's surface you might be looking at your grandmothers' photograph and on and on and by the end of the 19th page I was no smarter, but a lot more sillier.
So your suggestion didn't work.
Too bad. It's not actual rubbish when you decipher the greek roots.
The point is this: people believe wrongly that a photograph has a special relationship to what it depicts. We often think that a photo gives essentially true information about its subject, and more precisely that it is "transparent" in the sense that it is an extension of our vision. We also believe that the photograph gives information about its subject that is much superior to a drawing or a painting.
The authors make a proper distinction between devices that actually extend your vision, like a telescope, and those that do not, like a photo. The difference lies maintaining the spatial relationship between yourself and the depicted subject. For instance, if you use binoculars and move yourself to the left, you will see in them what's more to the left. That's a real transparent system. That is one in which you see through, in which you are really looking at the thing itself.
In contrast, when you move away from a photograph, or sideways, you are not changing your relationship to the depicted object (yes, that's the depictum, not the rectum). In other words, you are just looking at a plain old picture that gives you no superior insight into the world, the way a telescope can. So this is not a transparent system, and there is no special epistemological relationship between you and what you see.
Finally, the authors concede that
generally, photographs gives you better visual information about their subject than most drawings. However, they also argue that it is absolutely possible for a drawing to give you as good an information about its subject as a photo. In other words, there are no essential differences between a drawing and a photo. Only the statistically higher probability that a photo be accurate, compared to the average drawing, so to speak.
Get it? Photo != Truth.