…..Something hand made (or in our case, hand printed) by a good craftsman, maybe…..
I believe that, historically, this has been the challenge for photography to be accepted in the (fine) art world as many see it as not being hand made but the product of chemical/technological processes.
In an advanced photography class I took at the university last year, we wrote our own proposals and outlined our planned outcomes. I was the only student who was not going to use all digital. My argument, and one that I don’t necessarily fully believe in but wanted to bring into the discussion, was that digital moves the work just one more step away from showing the “hand of the artist,” something that, IMO, is always something that photgraphy has been criticized for. When we had our critiques, I always asked the others to identify the “hand of the artist” in their work. After all, whose ”hand” was shown in their work when they applied a filter in PhotoShop, theirs or the programmer who wrote it. It did create some interesting responses and veered into what we have looked at on this thread about ”what is art.”
That said, I don’t believe that the presence of “the hand” necessarily pulls a work into the realm of art either. I consider myself an artist and while I have been into photography for almost 50 years, I primarily like working by drawing with graphite on paper. And, in a previous career, I spent a decade as a draftsman, producing engineering drawings with a pencil on vellum, long before the the advent of computers to do the same. While I still admire “the hand” that is apparent in many of those works, I haven’t thought of them as art. Maybe I need to rethink that.