All the visual arts depend heavily on ordering the various elements according to the artist's preference, with the assumption that the visual impressions presented by the world are disordered and often chaotic. Photography is no exception. In fact, it requires more effort in organizing the image than do other arts, for the reason that the camera records everything in front of it. A painter selects from the view, but a photographer has to subdue, diminish, or hide the elements that are unwanted. Photographers' writings on this stress this time and again. Edward Weston, early in his career, in 1922, wrote that for photography, landscape was too "chaotic too crude and lacking in arrangement,' and it took him several years of work to meet the challenge. Ansel Adams wrote, "For photographic compositions I think in terms of creating configurations out of chaos, rather than following any conventional rules of composition." Cartier-Bresson called it "a rigorous organization of the interplay of surfaces, lines, and values. It is in this organization alone that our conceptions and emotions become concrete and communicable." The mountaineer-photographer Galen Rowell, writing specifically about a composition in Death Valley, begins with, "At first the scene appeared very jumbled to me " He is about to leave, when he thinks again and returns: "The zones that had first seemed so jumbled now converged in strong diagonals that I was able to compose by moving my camera position back and forth."

In Chapters 1...