Photographer Mariana Cook’s newest exhibition, entitled Out of Place — Out of Time, begins and ends on the Vineyard.
Encompassing 74 black-and-white photos of glacial erratics taken on the Island and all over the world from 2013 to 2024, the project is showing from November through February at Kultursiftung Basel H. Geiger, an art foundation in Basel, Switzerland.
A former apprentice to Ansel Adams, Ms. Cook has photographed subjects such as Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Maurice Sendak and Barack and Michelle Obama. Before that, Ms. Cook found her own beginning on the Vineyard, spending childhood summers on her family’s Chilmark property where she now shares a barn with her husband.
Early on she was ispired by the rich Island landscape. She said the first photograph she remembers having published, a shot of Quitsa Pond, appeared in the Vineyard Gazette. She recently unearthed the clipping in one of her mother’s scrapbooks.
“Among my first pictures are Vineyard pictures,” she said.
Later, the Island would appear in many of her professional projects. She photographed owner-built homes on the Island while studying under photographer Walker Evans at Yale, and she was inspired to travel the world photographing stone walls after she watched a herd of cows cross a crumbling section of the wall surrounding her property in Chilmark.
Though Ms. Cook is perhaps most known for her portraiture, and though she loves people, working with human subjects does not afford the same freedom as working with inanimate features of the natural world.
It was that desire for liberation, and a suggestion from a Vineyard friend, that helped her arrive at the idea of photographing glacial erratics — rocks displaced from their points of origin by glaciers during ice ages. The force of moving ice sheets can push stones remarkably far, depositing them all over the world.
And the world looked much different, Ms. Cook pointed out, when the last ice age reigned over 11,000 years ago.
“What I love about erratics is they’re sort of the opposite of stone walls, in the sense of they know no national bounds. They’re free,” she said. “They’re pushed by a glacier, and countries didn’t exist when the glacial erratics that we see on the Vineyard were dropped there by an ice sheet.”
She also admires that stones enjoy a kind of immortality, despite the environmental forces that may weather and displace them.
“When there’s another ice age, another glacier will come across Martha’s Vineyard, and they’ll pick up that stone and they’ll push it someplace else, and it will survive,” she said.
The first photo in the collection, Tree Shadow on Erratic, captures a large stone in her backyard in Chilmark that she’s had a fondness for since she was a child. The final photo, Erratic at Sea, Ms. Cook took on a beach in Aquinnah. The erratics in between are from all over the world: California, Chile, New Zealand, the Inner Hebrides of Scotland.
In all, the project took 11 years to complete. She knew the project was complete when she went to Finland to photograph a famous erratic, a rock said to have fallen into the sea when a priest tried to throw it at a giant and missed.
“It was enormous, and it was so ugly,” she said. “It didn’t speak to me at all…. I consciously did not take even a snapshot with my iPhone because I never wanted to see it again.”
“I just thought, you know what, that’s it, enough, so I stopped,” she added.
Ms. Cook’s exhibition found a home at Kultursiftung Basel H. Geiger after director Raphael Suter and his wife saw Ms. Cook’s work at one of her shows in Switzerland. When she pitched them her concept, they were receptive.
Seeing the project to its end and finding a home for it has been a relief.
“I’m glad it’s finished,” she said.
The exhibition is accompanied by a book, as well as a documentary by Evelyn Schels, whose other subjects have included Georgia O’Keefe and Marina Abramovic. The film examines Ms. Cook’s artistic process and spans the Vineyard, New York and Spain.
“[Ms. Schels] felt it was important to try to reveal me as an artist, but also my process, which is traditional analog photography,” she said. “I use film. I make my own prints. A lot of people don’t know what that is and have never seen it.”
The Vineyard continues to serve as inspiration for Ms. Cook. Her multiple ongoing projects, which include landscapes, portraits and still lifes, contain bits of Island beauty that strike her — beauty that can come from unexpected places.
“If I see a head of lettuce that really speaks to me, I’ll photograph the head of lettuce that was grown on Martha’s Vineyard,” she said. “It’s just a place where I am and where I see and feel for things.”