Chapter

Carrara Marble Quarries #24 & #25, Carrara, Italy (diptych), 1993

Taken a few years into Burtynsky’s Quarries project, Carrara Marble Quarries #24 & #25, Carrara, Italy, show the workings and massive scale of a live site. These images contain more practical information than many others in the series. While the angular cuts appear geometric, they conform to the natural contours of the mountain, as seen in the diagonal recession of the left-hand panel. A bulldozer provides an indication of scale. Large blocks lie waiting to be subdivided or sold whole, depending on their ultimate use. We see the materials’ properties revealed in dust accumulations and in mineral stains from water infiltration. This is the beginning of a new type of knowledge that Burtynsky’s work would cultivate: an education in industrial materiality.

Quarries was Burtynsky’s first major body of work. Though still subtle compared to his later pictures, the tension between natural processes and human ambition becomes more pronounced here, sharpening the thematic focus of his evolving project.

Since prehistory, humans have quarried stone to build walls, temples, and tombs. For many ancient civilizations—Harrapan, Minoan, Shang, Sumerian, etc.—the material culture made of perishable organic material—wood, textiles, hide—disintegrated long ago. What typically endures are the ceramics, metalwork, and monumental stone architecture. Exceptionally, ancient Egyptian burial customs have ensured a fuller material record, right down to royal corpses preserved deep within pyramidal tombs. It was during the Railcuts project, while photographing blasted mountains, that Burtynsky began reflecting on the enduring legacy of carved stone, from the pyramids to the masonry facades of early modern skyscrapers. He wondered whether each monumental presence might imply an equivalent absence—an inverse pyramid cut into the land. This became the conceptual springboard for Quarries.

Initially, Burtynsky set his sights on the relatively modest scale of quarrying operations in Northern Ontario, but he quickly found these sites limiting. Then, local quarrymen pointed him to the far larger Rock of Ages site in Vermont. From Vermont, his research expanded: he and his long-time collaborator Jim Panou, a fellow photographer tasked with site research, began identifying major quarrying centres around the world, including Makrana in Rajasthan, India—source of stone for the Taj Mahal—and, inevitably, Carrara in Tuscany, the most famous marble quarry in Western art.

His original aim in Carrara was to photograph the source of Michelangelo’s David. Though that precise site was exhausted and inaccessible, its brilliant whiteness is visible from afar in Carrara Marble Quarries #20, Carrara, Italy, 1993. Carrara still supports more than a hundred other quarries, most now mechanized and operating at industrial scale. Staggeringly, between four and five million tons of stone are extracted from the region each year.

The aesthetic impact of the works can sometimes obscure environmental cost. Marble dust—visibly accumulating on the ground here—is not chemically inert. Windborne, it coats vegetation and impedes photosynthesis. Waterborne, the marble slurry alters river chemistry—notably in the degraded Frigido River near Carrara—and suffocates fish. The dust also harms lungs—human, animal, and avian. Though the Quarries series is not as overtly ecological in its message as the later works, the implications are not concealed. We see the dust; we recognize the transformation. Environmental health hazards may not be our first thought—given the formal grandeur of Burtynsky’s images—but the cumulative effect of the work from this series onward ensures that such considerations inevitably surface.