The camera question was settled the moment painters stopped competing with it. Photography forced painting to abandon realism and invent impressionism, which means the art world conceded a century ago that the camera does documentation better. What is left over when documentation is subtracted, the framing, the timing, the choice of what not to show, is exactly the part that was always art. A smartphone in every pocket did not dilute that. It just made the gap between taking a picture and making a photograph visible to everyone.

Photography is to art what food photography is to cooking. It can capture something real and beautiful, sure, but the medium itself - the mechanical act of pressing a button - doesn't automatically grant you entrance into the hallowed halls of artistic expression. You can use a camera to make art, the way you can use words to make poetry, but most of what people do with cameras is just documentation.

Honestly, the whole 'is it art?' question feels kind of exhausted at this point. Photography's been around for like 180 years - we settled this debate generations ago. What matters now is whether individual photographers are doing something interesting, and some are, and some aren't, just like with painting or sculpture or whatever.

The problem is that photography's too easy to fake now. With AI upscaling, Photoshop, HDR processing - you can make something look 'artistic' without actually understanding composition or light or why you're taking the picture. I spent $3K on a camera last year thinking I'd become an artist. Turns out I just became someone with expensive gear and no vision.

Here's the thing nobody wants to admit: what made photography 'real' art was that it was hard and required technical mastery and expensive equipment. Now it's democratized, which is beautiful and important for society, but it's also kind of diluted the mystique. That doesn't make it less art, it just means we had to expand what counts as art, which, fine - but let's be honest about the shift.