Looking at | Looking through

I have always enjoyed using photography to understand the materiality of the world around me. Channeling my inner Winogrand, I will photograph objects to discover how they look when photographed. Sometimes I think the resulting images have artistic merit; other times they seem more indexical, like a collection of butterflies. I've heard the tension between the indexical and artistic aspects of photographs framed in terms of looking at versus looking through. Looking at a work of art; looking through a photographic record of a painter's body of work. I've read that artists own the copyright on documentary photographs of their work, while photographs of sculpture are considered interpretations, with copyright being held by the photographer.