In The Craftsman Richard Sennett argues that craftsmanship is broader than “skilled manual labor", which is how many photographers understand their technical photographic skills. Craftsmanship names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves.

Craft, as Sennett sees it, belongs to the category of "social capital": knowledge and skill that are accumulated and passed on through social interaction, and which are easily lost when social customs change.

In his review of Sennett's text in The Sunday Times Roger Scruton observes that:

The Craftsman continues an argument begun in the 19th century, when writers such as John Ruskin and William Morris extolled the crafts remembered in our surnames (Smith, Cartwright, Thatcher, Mason, Fletcher) while lamenting the mind-numbing and soul-destroying labour of the industrial process which was replacing them. A long line of thinkers, from Hegel and Marx to Sennett’s teacher Hannah Arendt, have sympathised with the argument. But Sennett does not think that craftsmanship has vanished from our world. On the contrary: it has merely migrated to other regions of human enterprise, so that the delicate form of skilled cooperation that once produced a cathedral now produces the Linux software system.

In opposition to this we have the Arts and Crafts movement's idealization of the individual atelier as a bulwark against “alienated labor”, which has remained widespread even now, as new disciplines, such as digital craft, challenge the primacy of traditional photographic processes.

Photographers often see themselves as artists rather than being part of the crafts because craft is marginalised, ignored, and simply not accepted as a subject worthy of attention by the media, policy makers or critics.