We are the amators.
We didn't invent light — we learned to catch it on the fly. Photography is a polite way of saying: look. The world is full of things worth a second glance, so we gave them a third — sometimes in full colour, sometimes stripped down to pure shadow and light, and sometimes coaxed onto paper through gum bichromate, a process so slow and unpredictable it feels less like photography and more like negotiation. We look, we click, we argue about cropping — you get the results.