Some years ago Ted Cohen published an essay entitled What's Special About Photography?' This question, it seems to me, represents a conception of what is sought and how to arrive at it that has tended to predominate in philosophical and theoretical writing about photographic art. The conception starts from the rather obvious premise that the concern of photographic aesthetics is photographic art. The next step is to invoke the belief, held widely at least since Lessing and much reinforced by Clement Greenberg,2 that the nature of the medium in which works of art are made determines the proper ends of the fine arts. Accordingly, the next premise is that the fine arts are properly conceived of as being composed of distinct media of differing aesthetic value. The aim of aesthetics, then, is to explore the valuable distinctiveness of each medium. On this line of reasoning, if the advent of photography constitutes the birth of a new art, then there must be something or valuably distinctive about the photographic medium. If, as its British co-inventor thought, photography is just a new means of pursuing the ends of painting,3 then it is not a new art, but merely a new means of doing what painters have done for a long time. The thought that photographic art is continuous with, and should not be treated separately from, the other pictorial arts has remained a regularly defended position in theoretical debates about photography ever since.4 So too has the alternative, namely, that photography is valuably distinctive from the other pictorial media and is therefore an independent art form. According to this view, if there is a distinct art of photography, a distinct medium for aesthetic investigation, then there must be something valuably distinctive about photography.5 Hence the question: What's special about photography? Comparing photography with other pictorial media is a perfectly reasonable way to go about unearthing insights into its aesthetic significance. Indeed, by the end of this paper I will have offered, in outline at least, an account of what I think is valuably distinctive about photography. For the moment, what interests me about this conception of the problem facing the aesthetic inquirer is the system of pictorial kinds upon which it rests: that is, the implicit assumption that the pictorial arts are best investigated philosophically by the division of the phenomena to be explained according to the medium of production. Dividing up the phenomena this way establishes a number of distinct categories that together form something of a system of kinds in terms with which aesthetic inquiry is conducted. Obviously, it is not the only system of pictorial kinds capable of serving as the foundations of aesthetic inquiry, for one could as fruitfully build a pictorial aesthetics upon distinctions among pictorial kinds drawn on the basis of subject matter or genre. Alternatively, one might do the same thing with periodic, art historical, or critical categories of pictorial kind. Another, less populated, system of pictorial kinds is that composed of the distinction between figurative and nonfigurative pictures. There are no doubt many more ways of distinguishing pictorial kinds. Most of these constitute ways of sorting pictures of more or less use to the aesthetic inquirer. If philosophers and theorists interested in photographic art have tended to employ the system of kinds defined by the medium of production, it is no doubt because this system best served the ends of their inquiry.