Photographer Mariana Cook finds extraordinary beauty and resonance in ordinary objects
Mariana Cook made her name as a portrait photographer shooting luminous character studies under the tutelage of Ansel Adams.
But after producing a series of series on mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, couples, and scientists, Cook decided to focus her lens on a stack of pancakes.
“Close at Hand,” Cook’s third show at Linda Durham Contemporary Art, subjects the photographer’s revealing eye to a scavenger hunt’s worth of everyday objects: a bird’s nest, a starfish, a cabbage. The series is the result of a project Cook undertook in reaction to all those portraits; she took one photograph a day for three and a half years.
Cook’s portraiture expertise defines the presentation. The black and white, silver gelatin prints are minimal, stripped of both background and frippery. They come in two sizes: 4-by-4 inches and 36-by-36 inches. All hail from her book “Close at Hand” (2007, W.W. Norton & Co.).
“I had published four books on different relationships, and I didn’t quite know what to do next,” she said in a telephone interview from her New York studio. “I looked in the refrigerator, and there was an egg. Another day, I might go out to the park and photograph a tree.”
The pancakes were the creation of a friend who was cooking breakfast.
“There’s one that’s a little deformed, and it has a floppy ear,” Cook said. “You don’t look at pancakes from (a side) perspective. You usually look down at a large plate of pancakes. But here you’re down at eye level. It looks like an architectural tower. We were just having a brunch for my mother-in-law.”
The objects seem to harbor their own solitary world of beauty and mystery. You notice the slightly rough texture of an egg or the filigree of batter lacing a pancake’s edge.
“They’re all quite quiet,” Cook said. “We tend to think we have to go looking out in the world to find something different.”
Many of the pieces veer into abstraction. Viewers often puzzle over the object’s identity, as a cluster of clouds could just as easily be cotton balls, while a close-up of hazelnuts triggers a double take as guests try to decipher the visual patterns.
“It’s so much fun to do that,” Cook said. “A major part of this work is scale. We bring preconceived ideas to what we look at, and I love challenging that.”
Cook has often said she learned her craft from Adams. She met the great photographer through a cousin. She studied with him from 1978 to 1984, becoming his last protégé. Cook commuted to his studio every three months, mailing him prints in between.
“Once you know craft, you can depart from how it’s used conventionally,” she said.
Adams taught her how to make technically good negatives and how to make prints reflecting her own emotions.
“Ansel Adams would write back with comments,” she explained. “He said, ‘You’re mistaking contrast for brilliance. It doesn’t convey the sense of light within.’ ’’
The master of the landscape saw Cook as an original.
“He said I wasn’t derivative,” she said. “I did not photograph the same way he photographed, and he liked that.”
For her next project, she’ll be returning from inanimate objects back to people again. She’s shooting portraits of mathematicians for Princeton University Press. She’s also “80 percent” finished with a book about walls. Its genesis sprang from the day 56 cows showed up on her freshly seeded Massachusetts lawn. The bovines made the trip from her neighbor’s property through a broken stone wall.
“I wanted to repair the wall, and my neighbor didn’t want to share the expense,” Cook said. “It was a lot of tension that had built up between us. What do walls build up between people?”
She decided to raise the money to repair her share of the wall through her work, traveling to England, Ireland, France and the Shetland Islands in search of medieval and Roman walls.
Cook started taking pictures when her parents gave her a Brownie camera when she was 8. By the time she applied to Yale University, she had produced so many pictures that they placed her in the graduate program. She wrote her thesis about the pioneering photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Her father was a psychoanalyst who would people-watch with her and intuit their psychological traits.
Cook discovered she could use photography to reflect those observations.
“It’s a silent medium,” she said. “You can get in a lot of trouble if you repeat those insights to a friend. But if you make a portrait, you don’t have to say anything.”
Some of her subjects have objected to the way she captured their image, an issue Cook says often reflects more of their selfperceptions than her images.
“I’ve had a number of experiences where they came back to me years later and said I was right,” she said.
If You Go
WHAT: “Close at Hand,” Mariana Cook
WHEN: Reception 5-7 p.m. today. Through April 19.
WHERE: Linda Durham Contemporary Art, 1101 Paseo de Peralta
CONTACT: 466-6600
