Eric, You're right, it's a personal thing, and I'm obviously overstating the case to make a point. In the late fifties and early sixties I doted on Ansel and Edward. Both were very good photographers and, in those days at least, Edward's sex life, especially, was very dotable, especially when it came to shots of Tina stretched out nude in the sun.
But you have to remember that those two guys were doing landscapes at the dawn of photography as a serious art form. They were originals, and most of their descendents are copying what they did. Every once in a while I see a photographic landscape that's original work, but very, very, very rarely. Most current landscapes are tedious at best, and virtually all the landscapes I see on LuLa fall into that category.
What Edward, and especially Ansel were doing was studio work, and the darkroom was their studio. Oh, yes, they made their careful, tedious, f/64 exposures outdoors, but most of the real work was done in the darkroom. In Brooks Jensen's Letting Go of the Camera there's an article titled "Project Work vs. Greatest Hits." In it, Brooks points out: "Most people aren't aware that a straight print of Moonrise Over Hernandez is almost unrecognizable compared to the finished print we've all seen published and reproduced so often. In the original, unmanipulated print, the sky is almost jet white and the moon is a perfect Zone X white disc in the middle of this almost-white sky. In the final print, this almost-white sky is printed to almost jet black and the moon becomes a detailed glow." In other words, as Ansel put it: "The negative is the score. The print is the performance." Or, to put it a different way, Ansel's, and to a lesser extent, Edward's real art was post-processing.
Somewhere in the early sixties I stumbled on HCB and my whole attitude changed. Yes, natural beauty is worth recording, but no photograph can even begin to approximate the natural beauty I see every day when I step outside my door. I keep coming back to what Brooks said in this month's LensWork: that a photographer's real job is to say, "look at this," and say it in a way that illuminates what the casual observer usually misses. To me that means a story: street photography to say "look at this" about something telling in people's behavior or attitude or interrelationships, or the ghosts of the departed left behind in abandoned structures and implements. None of this rules out landscape, but landscape that shows the relationship of people to the land is what makes a great landscape, as Turner, Constable, and Cole, and I suspect even Ansel and Edward all knew.
What's Ansel's most famous photograph? Clearly it's "Moonrise Over Hernandez." What's "Moonrise Over Hernandez" about? It's about the relationship of the little town of Hernandez to its surroundings.
I rest my case.