This is an expansion of a post I made on a thread about "manipulation"

While Ansel Adams was a master printer and a photographic and American icon, I grow tired of hearing about Adams and manipulation. It misrepresents his aesthetic and his working philosophy. If you read anything about Group f/64 you will find that the movement promoted "straight photography." This means among many things that photography should stand on its own merits and not try to mimic painting or drawing. A photograph according to this aesthetic philosophy a photograph should be sharp, nearly everything in focus and should represent reality. Dodging and burning change are hardly manipulation, the contents of the scene remain intact but the feeling changes with the changing of some tonal relationships.

Prior to the straight photography movement was the Pictorialist movement. Soft focus and heavy manipulation were key as was narrative. One of the last proponents of pictorialism was William Mortensen. If you haven't heard of him, it is no surprise as Ansel Adams and Beaumant Newhall despised him and his work and essentially wrote him out of history by Newhall omitting from his History of Photography book.

Furthermore, the world of photography and its nearly 192 year history is vast, complex and rich. Dig deeper that Ansel Adams. Other photographers did far more manipulation in the darkroom beyond what he did before and after him. For instance Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Henry Peach Robinson and Jerry Uelsmann and Carol Golemboski.

There is some validity to your point of view. But truly I think the Pictorialists (and you) are just as much over the top as the F64 Group's concept of Straight photography.

I see both of those styles as equally valid art. And equally valid photography, both today and in their time at the peak of their popularity.

I think most of today's photography makes use of characteristics emphasized by both styles while dropping some of the rigid dogma that separated the two schools of thought to no purposeful end.

Photography really is about generating emotions in the viewer. A little blur here or there does that. Extreme sharpness in other places does the same.

The photographer is NOT following a script, but rather is making one. Photography is a visual communications media.

And as a communications media the art, and the creative artists, are not limited to norms of other such mechanisms. We need not do only what is done with paint, or with a statue, or with written art, or with aural art. We do visual art that is communicated in its own way.

Consider a person born profoundly deaf. They communicate without ever hearing the sound of a word. Writing and thinking are not translated to an internal spoken word the way most humans do. It is translated to visual symbols.

Our photographs are those same visual symbols! They can have the same range of expression and emotion and meaning as any other form of communications.