Yes, Ansel Adams definitely established a look for B&W landscapes that has endured to this day. If you browse through older photos, however, like those from the late 1800s and early 1900s, they are less contrasty, less DoF, and more grainy. I live on the PNW as well, and a lot of the environs in Oregon got photographed extensively around those times as both photography was rising in use and the areas were being more industrialized. My small town has a collection of photographs from really old days that the mayor often posts on her blog. I find a lot of these technically inferior but less "doctored" B&W images to be more interesting than the heavily worked masterpieces by Adams and his club. There's a place for both, but the more imperfect but highly documentary type of images have a lot of soul.
The difficulty I find in people who use the Ansel Adams argument is that his pictures, no matter what time they were taken, are slices of unique time that can be only used and understood within their own context of time. The technicality of how they were made can be argued ... and has been for such a long time ... but depth of field, the aperture used, grannies of the film are all products of their technical limitations.
The late 1800s and the start of the 1900s had limited film speed ... it took hours at worst and minutes at best to expose the image correctly.
Even in the 1900s the film speed was still what would one consider ISO 8 and ISO 400 was rarely used in the 1920s for sports.
Large aperture lenses were slow to develop at first, in the late 1800s you had f 6 at the brightest and f 8 on most lenses, f 3.5 become more common only in the late 1930s and f 1.9 arrived in the 1940s, pushed by the development of WWII. Very large DoF could be achieved mostly on large formats and even then it was more of a sacrifice to get faster development of the film itself
Film formats were pretty limited as well, "35 mm film was created when
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson sliced in half 70 mm
Kodak film then spliced the ends together. It became most popular between the years of 1905-1913 and was starting to be used for still photography." While later in his life he was using 35mm more and more a lot of his work was on more dependable large format cameras for documentary purposes.
Even the subject that Ansel shot had such a unique effect on the people, most American never seen the West Coast, even within the government, rich people with power were mesmerized by Ansel's landscapes ... Where today it's so easy to search pictures and places, books and the freedom of information, just Google anything, has given people eyes to see the world beyond anyone could afford.
Photography has become so accessable and cheap that anyone can try to be a photographer but it's so much more work to be recognized for your work.
Here's a question for anyone: if you would take Ansel Adams through time, to today and put in his hand any camera he wants do you think he would rise above all the other landscape photographers of today?
