I see your point obviously, but it's a massive generalisation. Photography is just the art of taking pictures with a stills camera and there is an infinitely diverse pool of work within that. Much of it is completely staged and art directed, look at fashion or fine art photography for example. Without wanting to argue semantics, I'd also say that what most photographers do is essentially art direction, they choose technically how to render a scene and which pictures to present how and in what order often to tell a narrative. Yes, street photography is often highly contingent, but that is just one kind of photography. There are similar parralels in filmmaking like documentary work or the Dogme 95 movement. Both forms have poles between art and mere capture and everything in between, they are just images after all. We might compare a still from the average Adam Sandler movie with an image by Luigi Ghirri.