Paru le 15/09/2011 | Relié sous jaquette XV-175 pages
Tout public
with a letter from Wendell Berry
Stone Walls
Stone Walls : Personal Boundaries was conceived by renowned photographer Mariana Cook at her home on Martha's Vineyard. After fifty-six cows strayed through a crumbling section of the stone wall she shares with her neighbor, Cook studied the tumbled wall carefully and was struck by its beauty. With that inspiration, she embarked on an eight-year journey, traveling to diverse locations such as Britain, Ireland, the Mediterranean, Peru, New England and Kentucky in pursuit of dry stone walls. Far from being a travelogue, these beautiful black-and-white photographs portray the wall in landscape, the wall as abstract form, and the return of rocks to nature. Cook is fascinated with the juxtaposition of stones and geometric composition, as well as with the resonance between walls of different cultures. The walls photographed range from 1 600 BC to the present time. With a tribute from Wendell Berry and essays providing a context for the walls of each region, this collection captures something fundamental about the relationship of human beings to the land.
Mariana Cook, the last protégé of Ansel Adams, is best known for her intimate character studies of people both in and out of the public eye. Her photographs are held in numerous institutional and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, as well as the Los Angeles County Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Her previous publications include the monograph Manhattan Island to My Self, and the much acclaimed portrait books, Fathers and Daughters, Mothers and Sons, Generations of Women, Couples, Faces of Science, and Mathematicians. In 2007, she departed from her portrait work with Close at Hand, a collection of still lifes, landscapes, and light abstractions. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.
Wendell Berry has spent his life in Kentucky and has lived with his wife on the same farm on the Kentucky River for fifty years. He is a farmer, a poet, an essayist, and the author of many novels and short stories.
