It is  now generally acknowledged that the photographic image has become firmly established as the predominant form of online imagery, and  that photography is now an increasingly pervasive mode of cultural production. 

However, the field of photography has expanded to such an extent,  with the various social media platforms,  digitalisation and the elaborate infrastructure, diversity of technologies  and computational processes,  that photography's specificity as  a specialized discipline or medium no longer makes much sense.  Photography is a form of art,  not a medium in the sense adopted and developed by modernist formalism in the late 20th century.  

We can go further and say that the  photographic is  no longer best understood as a particular art; it is currently the dominant form of the image in general in western culture. 

So we should think in terms of photography in art rather than art photography, since photography plays an important role in contemporary art beyond what we may call photographic art. One aspect of that role was the way that photography was used to change the status and thereby the character of the traditional ‘arts’ of painting and sculpture.