It would. There's no reason to say it wouldn't.
Anyway, the view of photography most people have is powered by their understanding of how it works, how it attains its results. You point the camera at a scene and - click - you get a resultant image that looks like that scene. So people are going to find it very representational. The fact that the essay notes the "easy verisimilitude" underlines that particular integral aspect of the understanding of photography that it produces representative images. Do people mistake those for reality? No. But they often assume that what appears to be taking place in the image actually happened.
I do believe hermeneutics is the wrong approach. Also, this isn't an ontological question at all. It's primarily epistemological. Going beyond what you can understand won't give you much insight.
No disrespect to the OP, but I think the question of the correspondance between photography and reality has become irrelevant today. It has been dealt with in depth, directly or indirectly, by thinkers such as John Berger, John Szarkowski, Susan Sontag, Stephen Shore, Teju Cole and countless others, many of whom were, or are, photographers.
More importantly — and much more interestingly — in has been dealt with photographically by photographers such as Stephen Shore, Lee Friedlander and William Eggleston. No accident that Shore titled one of his collections American Surfaces, and when Friedlander puts a cloud on top of a road sign, he's both asking and answering the question.
I agree that hermeneutics isn't the only way to approach this: in many ways, it's as out of date, if not more, than the examples I've just mentioned.
Philosophically—as well as esthetically, socially and politically—, the question of
what is reality has become irrelevant to us. It has strongly, and urgently, been replaced by the question of what is truth.
