We all love taking photographs. I take them everywhere, on a camera, on a mobile device, snap, snap, snap. We give cameras to our kids too. Even more snapping. But how much do we value those pictures?

As memory markers, they are addictive. As fun, they are ... great fun. But it all gets daft when amateur snappers think they are artists.

This is beautifully illustrated by a dispute between two non-professional photographers that surfaced in the Daily Telegraph. It started when camera enthusiast Sarah Scurr won a competition and got her picture of an iceberg in the Northern Patagonian Ice Field published. When fellow photographer Marisol Ortiz Elfeldt saw the icy image she recognised – it seemed – her own work and accused Scurr of plagiarism.

It turned out they were both on the same cruise, taking pictures at the same moment of the same iceberg. And their pictures looked identical except in colour tones (Elfeldt claimed Scurr had taken her image and Photoshopped it.)

Of course they looked identical – because we are not expressive artists when we take pictures. If Cézanne and Monet both stood and painted that iceberg, the results would be totally individual. Even if two amateur watercolourists painted it, their work would contrast – just as the work of every pupil in a school class would be different if they were on that cruise sketching that iceberg,

Photography can easily degenerate into a pseudo-art, with millions of people all taking pictures of the same things and all thinking we are special.

This amateur delusion of photographic art is everywhere today – from Instagram to the streets and hills, where there is always someone taking their holiday snaps too damn seriously.

This strange plagiarism row exposes the illusion on which today’s mass camera cult rests. Both these amateur photographers were convinced their creativity was special. The truth is that words like creativity, individuality, talent and originality don’t readily apply when you have a planet of people all taking photos.

And yet, this story points to the true nature of originality in photography. The moral is, if you want to take really great pictures, don’t go on a cruise. Go to a war zone – or your parents’ flat.

Photography matters when it finds original subject matter. It is a record of the world, so the real art of the camera lies in discovering something new and personal or revelatory. When Richard Billingham turned the camera on his family he showed his own world, bravely, movingly. When Robert Capa took his camera to the heart of war he found unforgettable truths. Brassai discovered an entire nocturnal world of magic, desire and sleaze in his book Paris by Night. Garry Winogrand had an incredible eye for the strange and compelling and his photographs bristle with reality. Larry Burrows in Vietnam created images that seem composed by some great tragic artist yet are utterly, dreadfully real.

These great photographers prove that it is only by seeking the extraordinary – which can be found in the ordinary – that photography becomes art. Great photographs reveal great, and terrible, realities.

In a world of pretentious and complacent amateur snapping, we are drowning those moments of truth in an ocean of the banal.