I think that there already is quite a lot of appreciation for good photography. Look at #photofeed and all the other photo curation projects, few of the photos there are proper blog posts. But the way that Steemit is currently made, it is primarily a blogging platform, so photos should never be posted alone, but accompanied by at least one small paragraph telling the story of the photo.
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
dedicated photography curation accounts pay attention to -just- photos. But the "regular" Steemians don't upvote them that often, by the looks of it. And you can't really rely solely on the curation upvotes ;)
I sometimes go through the "new" section of #photofeed and upvote the photos I like and I think that many others are doing the same :)
But nobody should expect to earn more for a photo than for a really good blog post that incorporates a lot of great photography. The problem is, that many lesser-known authors have their posts sitting at a few cents, no matter if they post a single photo or a longer blog posts.
I might be bitter... but what I see is that only the curation accounts (and competition accounts) benefit from the upvotes for the photos. This is of course a generalisation and exceptions are always there.