I do find the well known  criticism of photography as representation, which   is often made but those who hold that art is composed of sensation, to be  a  strange one.  The criticism  states that with representation the  photograph erases itself, as an object in itself, in favour of the thing depicted:   that is, the  photo becomes a metaphysical window on something else, in relation to which it is inferior - the image is of a lesser reality than the thing of which it is an  mage or to which it refers; that which it apparently represents. This metaphysical window is organised around the principle or logic of sameness. Hence the idea of good copies and bad copies. 

A  photograph as an art work  as distinct from a mere product as formed matter as it formed matter that shows something other than itself, that in some way has an intellectual content or meaning. What this  criticism gets right is that a photograph is  both a representation of  bark fragments and an object in itself,  and that the viewer's response to the image is composed of sensations or affects  (ie., the ways in which I respond in my bodily  encounter with the image and which arise out of my own previous knowledge, understanding and  experiences).  connection of model and origin

I find the criticism a strange or  misleading one.   After the demise of modernism,  why would  we say that the image is a lesser reality and  the bark primary? Surely the image is real and just as real  as the bark.   What we see on the screen  is an image -- it's blurry or  indistinct, has  a rich colour palette of green and orange and it is poetic in its approach to photography.    Even though we know that this photo is a representation -- an abstracture of the  pieces of bark that have peeled of the trunk of a tree --- we do not see the image as inferior to the bark.   We do not see  the bark, we do not mistake the image for the object  and we treat the image as a thing in its own right. 

The above criticism of representation is  a straw argument  as it assumes   photography’s historical alignment with truth, the evidentiary and the objective documentation of what has been is what photography is. This is  the conception  of photography’s existence as a documentary and indexical medium. Secondly,  that representation  is a true copy or mirror of the bark in that we see through the image as a window to the bark itself. That conception of the original object and true copy is a caricature of representation,  as mimesis from Adorno back to Aristotle  is a disavowal of simple imitation.

Firstly, poetics in photography is different  from the popular idea of photography correlated with hunting --- ie.,    to “capture” or take  images. Poietic, (the Greek, ποίησις),  means to bring forth something that did not previously exist. Secondly poetic can mean that something new in the world arises or happens. Poiesis is a bringing-forth into the unhidden.  A flower blooms, for example, or a new image  originates , brings forth and opens up. It is  one  that  moves in the direction of difference rather than sameness; a becoming other.  Mimesis within poiesis  is a  bringing forth a likeness that  also brings forth difference.