Epitaph to a Photographer
This article is only a portion of the full article. If you are already a premium subscriber please login. If you are not a premium subscriber, please subscribe for access to all of our content.

Our World
Photographs by Molly Malone Cook
Text by Mary Oliver
Beacon Press. 90 pages, $24.95

IN OUR WORLD, Mary Oliver writes of her longtime partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook: “M. had will and wit and probably too much empathy for others; she was quick in speech and she did not suffer fools … you had to be brave to get to know her.” I certainly felt all of those qualities during a brief exchange I had with Cook back in 1997, and this is just one of the wonderfully precise descriptions threaded throughout Our World, a collection of Cook’s striking black-and-white photographs, which Oliver has generously annotated with succinct, insightful memoirs about her late partner, who died in 2005.