At a reception in her New York studio last fall, Mariana Cook, known for her intimate portraits, spoke about her most recent project photographing stone walls. It began the day before Thanksgiving in 2002, she said, when a herd of cows had picked their way through a crumbling section of a stone wall on her family’s property on Martha’s Vinyard. Once her neighbor had wrangled the 56 cows back to their pasture, Ms. Cook studied the wall, which had always been there, but had never attracted more than a passing glance. It was built in the traditional way, from stones carefully selected for size and shape and fitted one by one into an interlocking self-supporting structure, without the use of mortar.

“I wanted to rebuild the wall,” she said. “There were a few tense days while [she and her neighbor] decided what to do. During those days, I walked the wall on my side. It was the first time I had really looked at it intently. Who had built this wall and when? It was beautiful. Stones rested on each other, securely or tentatively, many covered with lichen. Branches cast their shadows.”

So began an eight-year odyssey that took her first to New England, where the poet Robert Frost penned his most famous stanza (“Good fences make good neighbors), and then to Kentucky, Great Britain, Malta, and Peru. In Malta, she photographed the Hagar Qim Temple, one of the world’s most ancient religious sites, which is said to be the oldest dry stone structure on earth, built between 3600 and 3200 B.C.

Most of the walls Ms. Cook photographed are “working walls,” built by farmers to enclose their fields using materials at hand. “As I traveled from one stony place to another,” she said, “I discovered a similar story shared by disparate peoples. Farmers everywhere must work diligently to maintain their walls in landscapes ravaged constantly by the elements. The sad fate of family farms is the same everywhere. Unlike their parents before them, many farmers today know their land may not go to the next generation. Often children have no desire to stay. The walls are replaced by concrete blocks, wire, or wooden fences. Properties are sold. Second growth forests hide the fallen stones that once shaped farms. The self-sufficient family life and closeness bred by the farm is disappearing with its walls.”

Ms. Cook’s photographs capture the artistry in the craft of setting stones into place in walls that have stood the test of time. The limestone walls on the Irish island of Inis Meain are exquisitely patterned through the use of different shapes and sizes of stones. In one instance a “sheep creep” opening was fashioned, large enough for a sheep to pass through but not a cow.

The photographs as collected in the beautifully produced book, Stone Walls: Personal Boundaries (Damiani 2011) have a cumulative effect that conveys endurance, both human and built. From the Neolithic age on, the Modernist mantra, “form follows function,” plays out in structures that represent a collective investment in the future through the heroic effort to build something that will last.

Mariana Cook | Stone Walls: Personal Boundaries is on view through August 26^th at the Weston Gallery at Sixth Avenue, between Dolores and Lincoln in Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA. Above left: Limestone Field with Puddle, Inis Meáin, Ireland, 5 July 2005. Right: Feed Passthrough, Inis Meáin, Ireland, 17 September 2005.