In Brooks Jensen's latest LensWork podcast, Searching versus Finding, he talks about why a photographer would want to go to a National Park to photograph. Here's my brief response/defense:
Why go to a National Park (let's be cliche and use Yosemite as the example that is almost always used in arguments such as this) to make photographs when that place has been so extensively photographed? Why bother make a photograph of Half Dome, or El Capitan, when Ansel Adams has already made perhaps THE Photograph of all photographs of those features?
Even though one may go to Yosemite, and make, compositionally, a nearly identical photograph to Ansel (who, by the way, made nearly compositionally identical photographs to Carleton Watkins), that person is still bringing THEIR own experiences, THEIR own emotions, THEIR own memories to that photograph. It may not be that they think they can "one-up" those who came before, though by chance that might happen—for example if a freak storm passes through, and raises the drama to 11—but it may be that they want to make a photograph that is THEIRS. Their own piece of work, something that they poured their own emotions and experiences and feelings into. Whether this is enough to pass muster for acceptance into a gallery is another debate.
I would love to hang an original Ansel Adams print on my wall. The likelihood of that ever happening is almost nill—I don't know that I'll ever be able to afford such a thing. But I can go to Yosemite, and bring my kids and my wife, we can have our own experiences, create our own memories, and those things will be wrapped up into the photographs I make there. And that's more than will ever be in an Adams print on the wall.