>For instance a phone can do a great job in a backlit scenario by intelligently cutting the highlights and boosting the shadows. The resulting image shows both the subject and background clearly but it doesn't represent the real-word lighting conditions. As a result it's great for a quick snapshot but is less useful in an artistic sense.
This seems completely backwards to me. Artistic photography isn't about representing real-world lighting conditions as perceived by humans. Just putting a polarizing filter on a camera changes how the image looks from the way the scene actually appears to humans. Artistic photography routinely does very bizarre stuff with colors to achieve an artistic effect. Even Ansel Adams experimented with solarization, one of the earliest photographic effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarization_(photography)
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that photography has never been about accurately showing real-world lighting conditions, but rather either an artistic or at least idealized version of a scene or subject.
I guess I didn't really word this clearly, my intent was to state that the manual camera generally captures real-world conditions as a baseline. Then the photographer could in camera or in post manipulate the image to fulfill his artistic vision. While there are certain cameras which have inherent distortion for artistic purposes (e.g. Lomo camera) the majority of them are designed to realistically capture the scene in front of them.
In contrast the phone produces a specific artistic decision influence by the software. For instance in the backlit scenario the phone purposely boosts the highlights and cuts the shadows to create what it perceives as a more balanced image.
I'm not so sure about this. Even very old cameras have many lens settings, such as f-stops, which change the depth of field and can massively change how a scene looks. I fail to see how boosting highlights and cutting shadows, so the viewer sees a more balanced image, is really any different than using a wide-angle lens to capture much more in the image than a human can naturally perceive (human vision supposedly looks like a 35mm camera with a 50mm focal length lens setting; telephoto and wide-angle focal lengths are showing things quite differently from how humans would perceive it), or arranging a hyperfocal shot (so that both near and far objects are in-focus, something human eyes are incapable of).
This seems completely backwards to me. Artistic photography isn't about representing real-world lighting conditions as perceived by humans. Just putting a polarizing filter on a camera changes how the image looks from the way the scene actually appears to humans. Artistic photography routinely does very bizarre stuff with colors to achieve an artistic effect. Even Ansel Adams experimented with solarization, one of the earliest photographic effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarization_(photography)
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that photography has never been about accurately showing real-world lighting conditions, but rather either an artistic or at least idealized version of a scene or subject.