A disciple's lot: laying stones along a very long road

Often departing from the beaten track in remote parts of China, a photographer evokes the refinement of Chinese paintings and of nature itself

Michael Cherney loves taking pictures of mountains. And he loves taking those pictures the way they were painted by ancient Chinese landscape artists centuries or millennia ago.

One frame, a narrow strip of rolling hills taken on the plateaus of northwestern China, is dominated by the interplay between black and white and the multiple shades of gray in between. A meandering, monochrome composition, it is evocative of those ancient Chinese works in which ink was applied to paper in a few sweeping strokes to maximize the sense of grandeur.