Easy?

Anza Borrego, 2026

No one could have imagined that putting a camera on a phone would started as a gimmick to sell phones would have become the phenomenon that it is today. Any program about photography will tell you that people take billions of photographs everyday, most of which are from a smart device. But they are not photographers and ‘photograph’ is used in the loosest terms. Some say it was the beginning-of-the-end for photography, with everyone now claiming to be a photographer, helped along with online platforms and an audience that knows nothing about The Photograph.

One could argue that the decline of photography actually began around 126 years ago with the invention of the Box Brownie Camera making photography more accessible and affordable. But maybe that’s stretching things a little too far.

The image above could have been taken using a smartphone. I could have left the tripod in the trunk, I could have snapped the image through the windshield and not braced the 117 degrees that day. But I didn’t. Getting out, thinking things through and making an image may not appear to matter, but it does.

Good photography is not, and never has been, easy.