That the environments are there and you run into them is irrelevant because if you take a shot from a chapel or e.g. a car in a street, it’s there, placed there by others, designed and created by others. You just point your camera and shoot. Sure, you have to take a lot things into account with the camera, but so does…

By that photographer analogy the real artists are the programmers who created the software in the DSLR camera / features in photoshop, or in case of games, the programmers who wrote the 3D engine, the lighting systems, the post-processing shaders etc.