In The Real Challenge to Photography (as a communicative representational art), Robert Hopkins claims that a particular and significant kind of photography – what he calls ‘authentic’ photography – cannot exploit the same range of resources as non-photographic images when it comes to communicating thoughts. In this paper, I question this claim by raising concerns regarding the conditions Hopkins poses for something to qualify as communication of thoughtand, more importantly, by arguing that there are indeed techniques in ‘authentic’ photography that allow the artist to exploit the vehicle properties of the medium independently of the content