The silhouetted and blurred wildebeest in South Africa are defined by the negative spaceWhen we confront a landscape, we are surrounded by a chaos of visual elements. The scene challenges us to extract a unique composition that encapsulates the character and emotional impact we sense at that moment. We need to get past the overt subject, the postcard view, to pick out the unobvious yet significant aspects.

I always approached photography from the point of view of an artist. Until the age of 22 I thought of myself as a painter, working on watercolors, studying composition and technique at the University of Washington, and internalizing the history of both Western and Eastern traditions. My interest in photography was an outgrowth of my climbing in the Cascades of Washington, a way to record my adventures, but when I committed to photography, I naturally applied my background to the new medium. I was uninterested in being a documentarian.

I found the European Impressionists a...