In the Company of Stone

Description

Daniel Snow is a waller, an artisan who builds walls, terraces, caverns, and the occasional sphere or pool out of dry stone. It's an ancient skill - building with only what the earth provides. No mortar, no nails, nothing to hold his creations together except gravity, an invisible glue he can sense in the stones' "conversations" of squeaks and rumbles. A hollow sound means a void needs to be filled; a solid fit is secured with the sound of a bolt being thrown. Snow's evocative prose and Peter Mauss' richly textured photographs of Snow's work reveal the nuance and beauty of walling - and of one man's relationship with nature. The result is by turns poetic and practical.

Peter Mauss is a photographer of architecture, interior design, and landscapes. He lives in Vermont and New York. Since 1976, Dan Snow has been hand-building unique drystone constructions for clients in New England and abroad. He is one of only a handful of Americans certified by Great Britain's Dry Stone Walling Association. He lectures and leads workshops and is the subject of the documentary film Stone Rising. He lives in Dummerston, Vermont.

"Snow nestles his practical depictions of design within rhapsodies about earth and stone and man." --Santa Fe New Mexican