It’s not dead. In early 2021, nobody really cared about photography. We were on stages. We were running huge Clubhouse rooms. But we went unnoticed because we weren’t the loudest. We couldn’t even get onto the big Clubhouse stages to talk about art. When NFT NYC came around, there was one photography panel and zero exhibitions for NFT photography. There wasn’t a market because everyone thought photography was too easy to create. The iPhone came out and overnight everyone became a photographer. Then Instagram gave everyone a platform to show their work. As Keith Grossman once said, it’s not that photography lacks value. It obviously has value. People spend hours scrolling Instagram to look at photos. The challenge is that photography became harder to monetize. When I first started photography in 2007, I drove around Northern California for weeks trying to get galleries to show my work. Every gallery told me the same thing. Photography doesn’t sell well. It’s not valuable. Anyone can take a photo. Nobody is going to pay more than a few hundred bucks for one. I couldn’t accept that. It’s the reason I saved up, lived out of my car, moved to Vegas, and opened my own gallery. Even in my own gallery, I’d hear people walk around saying things like I could shoot that with my iPhone or anyone could take this. How can someone charge $5k for a photo. That’s the reality. A lot of people still don’t see photography as real art. They think you just press a button and the camera does the work. What they don’t see is the time it takes to create a meaningful image. They don’t see the planning or the story behind it. They don’t see behind the scenes, the countless hours, money spent, sacrifices, and planning to create an image. They don’t know what went into getting that shot. It takes time to connect with photography in a way that goes beyond just looking at a beautiful landscape. With painting, people understand how long it takes because most people can’t paint. But with photography, everyone assumes they can do it. Back in 2021, when Beeple’s sale hit, everything shifted fast. People were chasing glitch art, animation, and digital painting. Meanwhile, we were still in Clubhouse rooms arguing whether photography even belonged as an NFT. Most of the space ignored us. We weren’t loud enough. We weren’t flashy. But we were here. And we’re still here. A lot of us have realized that NFTs are not just about hype. They’re about provenance. They’re about ownership. Somewhere along the way, that conversation got drowned out in the noise of 2021 when everyone was focused on flipping and making money. Photography is not dead. It just never had it easy. But it never needed easy. It just needs time.