Was photography accepted as a legitimate art form in the 19th century?

As far back as
the tenth century, Arabian physicist and mathematician Ibn Al Haitam experimented with images
seen through the pinhole. Then, in the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci observed that if the
facade of a building faces the sun and a hole is drilled through a wall that is also facing this
direct direction, images of everything all the objects that are illuminated by the sun will be
projected upside down upon the wall facing the sun.  This phenomenon he termed "oculis
artificialis" [artificial eye]. From this observation, men began the process of developing
the camera. Much later in France, inventor Joseph Nicephore Niepce experimented with
camera obscura and silver chloride. Certainly, at this point camera images
were a scientific study.

With the advancements made in photography, many
artists saw this medium for recording visual images as a tremendous threat to their
professions.  With the invention of the Kodak No. 2 Brownie box by George Eastman in America,
the camera became an affordable and popular item. In fact, in 1862, a group of French painters
became interested in the perspective that the camera's "eye" presented as opposed to
that of the human eye. One impressionistic painter whose perspective imitated the camera's eye
is Edgar Degas, who depictions of ballerinas is from unusual and cropped perspectives.  In May
of 1874, French artists exhibited impressionistic photographs; moreover this group continued for
twelve years and had work exhibited by such greats as Cezanne and Gauguin.

Nevrtheless, despite the movement of Pictorialism in which men like Peter Henry Emerson
exhibited their aesthetic and emotionally charged photographic images, photography
was really not recognized as an art until the twentieth century with such
artistic individuals as Ansel Adams, who made use of "Zone System" and
"F-64" in which everything is in focus. With filters and other devices, in
his beautiful photographs from the National Parks of the U.S. he recreated dimension and detail
as well as magnificent panorama.