In Seduction and Flirations in Photographies (vol.1 Issue 2, 2008) Patrizia Di Bello says:

Photography theory, particularly as thought through structuralist and post‐structuralist models, has tended to think about photographs as dematerialized images, loci of meanings rather than objects in themselves – materiality being the province of connoisseurs and old‐style curators hung up about vintage printing techniques and desperate to re‐invest photographs with the aura of a work of art to give status to themselves and the objects in their archives. However, as Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk argue in their survey of the discipline [in Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods], art history has not only moved on from exclusive concerns with great artists and canonical works, but has been always potentially open to eclectic approaches, freely borrowing from a range of disciplines, and in many cases setting the boundaries of its own in ways elastic and porous enough to be productive rather than constrictive .... If an interest in language‐based semiotics made the photograph's materiality secondary, as a carrier of meaning generated elsewhere; and if a visual turn emphasized the often disembodied gaze of the viewer/photographer; then the recent interest in materiality and the senses focuses on how both of these aspects might interact with the body of the photograph and its various beholders.