Blah, Blah, Blah, Photography?

I thought that by spending most of the day looking through lots of photography on-line I would become wonderfully inspired for my upcoming trip State side next month. But sadly the opposite seems to have happened after trolling through countless images of desaturated images reworked within an inch of their life somewhere between a cartoon and the page of a colouring book. I hate this kind of photography which is neither here or there. In fact I don't even know what to call it and only hope the followers of the dark cloth understand what I mean. And as for HDR photography (High Dynamic Range, or as I like to call it, Highly Dynamic Risotto-Of-Crap), well thats even worse and you might as well flip the image to black and white and get your felt tips out.
I have always liked the purer side of photography and recording something that was actually there as apposed to adding something that wasn't. Of course I am not saying I don't make any adjustments, I just like a spade to be a spade, not a cartoon spade.