Aiming for objective capture of light is a kind of photography. Even the best camera and most careful selection of lens and settings isn't objective, so it's only an ideal for those people, and an impossible one to reach.

Some people certainly go for the still life type of photography. It is emphatically not the only or even a significant part of photography as an art. All the best photography has something of the photographer in it. Even the still life stuff is composed in and out of the camera.