I've just been looking with some attention at O'Sullivan (I bought _Framing The West_, prompted by a recent thread on him), and I feel like the narrative of his photos is fundamentally different from Adams's. O'Sullivan's landscapes are rougher, more dangerous, and more inhabited---the whole storyline of Adams's grand-landscape work is about the *pristine* landscape, which I submit was not a primary concern for a guy who kept putting his developing tent in the photo!
...
I still get very different artistic voices from them, and I tend to think Adams deserves credit for the cultural birth of that pristine-grand-landscape gestalt in photography, even if he *did* reuse O'Sullivan's tripod holes to do it. (Indeed I think it speaks quite well of both of them that they could tell two different stories about the same raw material.)
-NT
Ansel and O'Sulivan are very definitely the forebears of two different lineages in photography. Many would argue that Ansel and his subsequent pupils have ultimately created a very precious and accessible strand of photography, which
strangely, appeals to those not as well versed in the visual arts (or interested in it). This is
strange because Ansel's best known work was more firmly rooted in the pictorial tradition, whereas O'Sullvans was straight, mechanical and arguably, more
purely photographic.
O'Sullivan's strand of landscape representation has led to the more dispassionate, politically motivated and art savvy colour work of the natural scene today - which takes a great deal from painterly convention,
as well as photographic history. The Ansel lineage, made up of people like Sexton, Barnbaum, Rowell, Muench, is a very insular photographic world, which
still insists, "thou shalt not not take from other visual arts". The reason those guys won't be listed in the history books along with their American contemporaries like Misrach, Burtynsky and Klett is because their work fervently and stubbornly denies art tradition, for a kind of 'photography meets Thoreau' utopia. In my mind, it's like the 'fantasy' genre of photography.
I say this by the way as someone who loves Ansel and others of that lineage, in small doses. But I believe the kind of 'tradition' the OP alludes to
is a 'vacuum tradition' or put more directly, photographic naive art - a world unto itself. When photography is
already a niche, too much of this work makes me feel claustrophobic. Which is why I gave up on making romantic landscape pictures.
The Ansel lineage is sneaky in a way, for standing on the shoulders of giants (painters) - in terms of its subjective representation - without acknowledgement or reference.