Craft vs. Capture: Is Photography Still an Art?

Seeing the small gestures, the small dynamics tells a compelling and full story. These hands and the use of the tool, are much more than an image.

There’s a moment, just before the shutter is pressed, when something shifts. A tension between instinct and decision. Between letting go and being precise. Between the fleeting and the eternal. That’s where the craft lives.

But in a world where everyone carries a camera in their pocket and can instantly photograph anything—from their lunch to a once-in-a-lifetime sunset—we’re left with a question we rarely dare to ask: is photography still an art? Or has it become something else—quicker, flatter, more reactive and less reflective? Just another way to document, share, and move on?

The truth is, capture is easy. Seeing is not.

We’ve made image-making frictionless. There’s no barrier, no pause, no ritual anymore. We photograph without thinking, often without even noticing. Yet when I think about how I fell into photography—not the industry, not the profession, but the act—I remember the space between looking and clicking. I remember the weight of a camera in my hands. The slow buildup of intention. The small voice inside that said: this matters.

Back then, you had to wait. You had to feel the light, trust your gut, and often, be wrong. There was no screen to show you what you'd caught. The result came days later, developed in chemicals or printed in small, delicate rectangles you’d hold up to the light. And through that wait, through that delay, photography taught patience. It taught looking. It taught care.

Today, the delay is gone. The result is immediate. And with it, something else has vanished too: the respect for process. The photograph is no longer a result of labor—it’s just data, a digital file, swiped past, filtered, posted, and forgotten.

And yet, people still talk about a “good eye.” As if seeing were some innate skill. But having a good eye isn’t something you’re born with. It’s something you grow. An eye is trained through failure, through repetition, through study. Through looking at light—noticing how it falls, how it slips across a surface, how it changes what we see and how we feel. A good eye knows not just how to frame something, but when not to press the shutter. A good eye is not about aesthetics alone—it’s about awareness. About presence. About understanding that photography is not just the registration of the visible, but the shaping of meaning through choice.

Art in photography doesn’t happen at the moment of clicking. It happens before. In the curiosity that leads you there. In the silence you enter when you wait. And it happens after. In the editing, the reflection, the refusal to settle for the obvious.

We live in a time of content images—images made for algorithms, for reach, for speed. They’re designed to disappear. To perform well, then vanish. And they do. That’s their purpose. But that’s not photography. Not in the deeper sense. Photography, when it becomes art, isn’t interested in reach. It’s interested in resonance. It doesn’t vanish—it stays.

In my own practice, especially when I’m working close to the sea—documenting coastal labor, forgotten harbors, or the textures of boats and rocks—I return to that slowness. I try to make fewer images. Better ones. Ones that carry weight, or silence, or both. I call them hero images, not because they perform better, but because they hold the narrative on their own. They don’t shout, they don’t beg for attention. They just are. And when you look at them, they look back.

Photography is still an art. But only when it’s treated like one. When it’s practiced, not performed. When it comes from a place of care, not from the need to prove or post.

And if we let go of that craft, if we reduce the photograph to another bit of visual noise in an endless stream of content, we lose more than a medium—we lose a way of seeing. A way of being. We lose a language built on light and time.

But if we hold on to the craft—if we slow down, and return to the patient, deliberate act of seeing—photography will remain what it has always been, at its best: a form of attention. A discipline of care. A way to make time visible.