When quarries are the photographic quarry
In Gloucester, nine photographers look at the remains of a once-thriving Cape Ann industry
This is a show of stark, austere beauty, the austerity imparting a singular quality to that beauty. It’s also a show at once chastening and encouraging.
GLOUCESTER — “QuarryArt” is a double-edged title. The show consists of, yes, art about quarries: 37 photographs by nine photographers, with various Cape Ann stone quarries as their subject. That’s the more obvious meaning of quarry art. The other is that, as so many of the images show, the quarries themselves are a kind of art.
What we see is a violation of the land, the residue of literal gouging for profits. Yet what remains behind has a stark and unmistakable beauty. The quarries are a version of Earth art, land art, environmental art — take your pick — long before the terms existed.
“QuarryArt” is at the Cape Ann Museum Green. It runs through July 30. Note that CAM Green is slightly more than a mile away from the museum’s main site, in downtown Gloucester. It’s a five-minute drive or not-unpleasant 20-minute walk. Speaking of not-unpleasant, admission is free. It’s open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.
The exhibition is in the Janet & William Ellery James Center, one of four buildings on the CAM Green campus. The gallery space is airy and unfussy: high ceiling, exposed ducts and pipes, everything painted white. The spareness suits the photographic subject matter.
Boston Globe readers of a certain age and with a good memory might remember the byline of David Arnold, the show’s curator. His introductory description is splendidly concise: “Nine photographers, one year, the theme of quarries. Photographing on private land required permission. Otherwise, no constraints.” It’s an ideal aesthetic brief: enough guidance for direction, but only a bare minimum. Here’s what we want you to look at, but look at it however you wish.
Stone quarrying began on Cape Ann in the 1830s (the same decade that gave the world photography). There were as many as 60 working quarries in the area, some as deep as 150 feet. At times, quarrying employed some 1,200 workers. The Great Depression put an end to the industry there. Its legacy remains visible today, these awful yet also magnificent gashes in the land.
The photographs here from both Tsar Fedorsky and Constance Vallis are in black and white and verge on abstraction. Certainly, with their combination of stoniness and void, quarries can lend themselves to such an approach. They’re visually otherworldly, the extraction of stone making a piece of the natural world into a form of artifice.
Paul Cary Goldberg and Steve Rosenthal’s photos are also all in black and white, though neither’s pictures at all tend to abstraction. There’s nothing abstract about the sight of a “No Swimming” sign in Goldberg’s “At Manship Quarry” or of swimmers in “Steel Derrick Quarry.” There’s no sign of a human presence in “Blood Ledge Quarry #1.” Instead, it stands out among the general horizontality of the images in the show for its upthrust of stone.
Rosenthal is best known as an architectural photographer, and a picture like “Quarry Island” emphasizes the structural quality found in this balance of stone, vegetation, and water. There’s a deeply pleasing sense of repose. Here and in two other of his pictures, “Quarry Reflections” and “Quarry Edge With Ladder” there’s a juxtaposition of the solidity and strength of stone with the softness and transparency of water — except, of course, it’s water that erodes stone, not the other way around.
One of the revelations “QuarryArt” has to offer is the chromatic range to be found in what one might have assumed to be a chromatically drab subject. Albert Glazier’s quarry photographs recall Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” paintings: the sense of organic geometry, the delicacy of color, the fracturings of the picture plane. The use of color by Skip Montello and Martin Ray is no less attractive.
The dusting of snow in Montello’s “Flat Ledge Winter” and the melting ice in Ray’s “Winter Thaw, Babson Farm Quarry, Halibut Point” are reminders of how the look of quarries can change with the seasons. That’s the point Olivia Parker makes with her four color photographs at Halibut Point, though there the change is within a season. The shift from April 16 to May 5 can be quite startling.
Goldberg’s “No Swimming” sign is an implied reminder of that. Katherine Richmond’s “Swimmers” goes from implication to demonstration. From source of extractive profit to facility for human recreation is no small transformation. But as “QuarryArt” reminds us again and again, the quarries are undergoing a much more significant transformation.
This is a show of stark, austere beauty, the austerity imparting a singular quality to that beauty. It’s also a show at once chastening and encouraging. The chastening comes from the reminder that nature, given enough time, will have its way with man’s handiwork. The encouraging also comes from that reminder. Swimming holes are one thing. Saplings emerging from rock is another and even better thing. Or as Parker writes, “I’m amazed at the way nature is changing man’s exploitation of the land into a new natural world. From the violence of blasting and drills a landscape of great beauty is emerging.”