The following words belong to great photographer Igor Menaker and are taken from his web site:

Landscape photography is about landscape. It is the only subject by definition. Landscape photographers travel to remote places and try hard to exclude any human presence from the landscape. They chase a dream. It is 100 years old and the name of the prophet is Ansel Adams. There is nothing wrong with that. I enjoy it enormously.

But human presence in landscape can be extremely powerful. Even a tiny figure can get the same visual weight in our reception as the vast landscape surrounding it. Humans are social animals. Most of our visual perception apparatus inside our skulls is devoted to social interactions. Here is the order of importance as our brain sees it: face, body and body language, group of people, everything else. So, there is no surprise that if you put in a photograph on one side of the scale - landscape and on another side - a tiny human figure (of a photographer making a photograph of that landscape), they are almost equal. Because we are what we are, that is how we see, perceive and construct the meaning of this world.