‘Stone Walls: Personal Boundaries’ by Mariana Cook

“It was their beauty that kept me going,” Ms. Cook said. “You’ve got to be a little nuts to go all over the world, tromping around fields looking for walls.”

The quest began on her own property on Martha’s Vineyard, and expanded out from there. As she traveled New England in search of more walls, her interest in them only grew.

“Seeing the juxtaposition of two or three stones together could just be so beautiful,” she said. “Their intricacies were remarkable and endless.”

Because the practice of building them is on the wane worldwide — a direct result of the decline in family farms — Ms. Cook is donating a portion of profits from the book to the nonprofit Dry Stone Conservancy in Lexington, Ky., which is dedicated to preserving existing walls and revivifying the craft.

At first glance this subject seems something of a departure for Ms. Cook, 56, best known for books of portraits and family relationship pictures, like “Fathers and Daughters” (1994) and “Mothers and Sons” (1996). In 1996, while working on her 2000 book, “Couples,” she also made a portrait of a young Barack and Michele Obama, which was finally published just before he was inaugurated.

“My father was a psychoanalyst, and I was always interested in what beneath the surface made a person who they were,” Ms. Cook said.

Early on, however, she received a strong grounding in landscape photography as the last protégée of Ansel Adams, with whom she studied from 1978, after graduating from college, until his death in 1984. “Ansel taught me my craft,” she said.

Besides, Ms. Cook also says that a stone wall says a lot about the psychology of the person who made it. If you encounter a wall made with little stones shoring up the big ones, she noted, “you can tell that’s a lazy person who didn’t want to take the time and trouble to fit two big stones together.” But when it’s a well-made wall, “the stones are generally of a good size, and they rest on each other comfortably,” she said. “They look like they belong together.”