Stone walls

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.