Quarries

Edward Burtynsky's Quarries monograph offers a complete body of work spanning 1991 - 2006, picturing photographs of five marble quarries from across three continents. To Burtynsky, the gaps left behind by displaced stone comprise a man-made landscape, an inverted architecture of our modern monuments. His reserved compositions reduce the landscape to geometric abstractions, pierced by bright marble veins or mining equipment, all brilliantly rendered in high-quality, luminous reproductions. This steady photographic document subtly explores the shifting tides of industry, commerce, and labor, continuing Burtynsky's photographic discourse regarding the complex relationship of our global economy and the environment.

Over a twenty-five year career exploring the landscape as transformed by industry, the celebrated Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has accumulated a body of work on large-scale quarries around the world. Including Canada, Italy, China, Spain, Portugal, India and America these thought provoking studies of sites that are created as we dig into the earth for material in order to build our cities, urge us to consider how we as viewers are simultaneously attracted yet repulsed by these landscapes – somewhere a building is created while a landscape is destroyed.