Documenting the immense scars of large-scale resource extraction on nature, Edward Burtynsky's photo collection, Quarries, indexes the anxieties of global expansion
Somewhere a building is created while a landscape is destroyed; this tension between attraction and repulsion is at the core of Edward Burtynsky's (born 1955) Quarries. This book, a new edition of the out-of-print 2007 original, focuses on over 100 of the Canadian photographer's thought-provoking photographs of large-scale quarries he made worldwide over the course of 17 years—including the creamy marble of Carrara favored by Michelangelo, the high-grade granite of Xiamen, some of the planet's deepest quarries in Vermont and immense pits in southeast Portugal that read like an architectural plan turned inside out and upside down. From the painterly patina of abandoned quarries to the checkered surface of a rock face, Burtynsky reveals the processes of creation and the techniques of the quarrymen, drawn to the aesthetic force and overwhelming scale of these deconstructed landscapes as much as to the irrevocable damage they show.
