I've always been surprised by the way that the photo made with a film camera was understood as an index or trace of what had caused it. Photography was primarily defined by its technical basis: the way in which light reflected by an object or event in the real world is registered on the film emulsion even though this aspect of the photo-mechanical process has only a small part to play in the meanings that a photograph has.

Even Gilles Deleuze  does not invest photography with the creative and re-creative potential that he associates with both cinema and modern painting. In short, while he highly values other visual artistic forms, he seemingly presents photographic texts as stagnate documents or tools that produce certainty, organize bodies and desires, and iterate hackneyed ideas. He even uses photography as something of a foil to demonstrate the innovation of the cinema and the originality of modern painters. 

In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981), he notes how "photography has taken over the illustrative and documentary role, so that modern painting no longer needs to fulfill this function, which still burdened earlier painters" (10). He later explains that "photographs are ways of seeing, and as such, they are illustrative and narrative reproductions or representations ... . they are what is seen, until finally one sees nothing else." He treats the photo as an instrument for reproducing representations of reality—a device that iterates images until they are ossified as established stories, icons, or even stagnant perceptions.

Unlike the cinema, the photographic image, according to Deleuze, seeks to enclose, surround, or even control the dynamism of life. It seems incapable of defamiliarizing reality like Bacon's painting, and too dependent on framing or freezing images to represent time or movement in time. For  Deleuze photographs are  static images that reproduce ostensibly fixed information. Photography does not have  the power to unburden and emancipate that Deleuze associates with both film and painting.