What I meant by "misleading" is that stereotypes are made about certain famous photographers like AA based upon mass-reproduction of what is actually a small part of their overall work. If you take in his extensive portraiture, one-off small Polaroid shots, and actually decent examples of his
own early "fuzzy-wuzzies", that would probably change some opinions. F/64 was a brief manifesto mentality, which mellowed in time. But he was
widely recognized as a landscape photographer in this country by the 40's and 50's, both due to his major contribution to the National Park system
as a photographer and activist, and due to his core relation to planting photography departments in major museums, including a lot of work outside his personal genre preferences. Steichen was another early mover and shaker. But all along there were those sniping that AA was just a "rocks and trees" guy. Nonsense. He never made serious inroads into color photography, and I think he had a relation of envy toward Eliot Porter, who did, and whose coffee-table books soon overtook AA's black and white work in the heyday of land protection, when the battle turned from National Parks to designated Wilderness Areas. There was a famous big split in the movement between AA, who retained leadership of the Sierra Club, and David Brower, who split off and founded Friends of the Earth, and who passed away not too long ago here in town. AA accused Brower of spending too much money on color photography books and purged; but these book did have a huge public impact at the time.