Why do some people genuinely not see photography as art? It has existed for over 150 years, yet people still see it as nothing more than a reproduction of a subject. We live in an age of images, where our culture is steeped in the ubiquity of photography; the camera is inside everyone's phones, and proliferates on every app. Keep that in mind when you realise that a good photograph is hard to come by; despite an inundation of images, a truly beautiful piece of art, a stunning photograph, is harder to grasp. A photographer only hopes to make about one or two genuinely good photograph in their lifetime.
But even if we narrow our assessment of photography to people who buy the right gear (film cameras, full frame cameras, mirrorless cameras, ecosystems of lenses), we find another issue. How many people in the photography community can even take a masterful photograph? The worst thing I see in hobbyist photography is not necessarily a lack of passion, but a lack of vision. A family snapshot with low technical skill is only interesting to the person who took it. You can find people on Lomography, Instagram, Discord, or Reddit just post photographs that boil down to these elements:
>lack of detail or sharpness
>tonally flat (i.e., no tone splitting, no contrast between highlights and shadows)
>no choice in colour or tones
>no pre-production elements that would convey vision or ideas
>centre-shot
>no forethought about depth of field, especially if someone is just using the same aperture all day like Sunny 16
>noisy or grainy for no reason
>no meaningful use of negative space
>no sense of narrative
>flat with no sense of visual hierarchy (i.e., how your eye is supposed to be guided, from point to point)
>no ambiguity, so the photo is obviously just about a particular theme or subject