Ghost is self-hostable, easy-to-use, and looks beautiful. (Good) themes are usually a one-time payment, and they definitely have photoblog ones.

I use both Ghost and Wordpress for my sites and, while it’s not as infinitely customizable as Wordpress, Ghost is also not as needlessly complex, vulnerable, or time-intensive.

Do the comments ever load reliably? For me that would be a dealbreaker...

How is your RAM/storage usage? I'm interested in setting up my own instance (no communities, just a username that will always be here) but don't want to upgrade my VPS again. I already had to do that spinning up a Mastodon server.