Carrara Photographs by William Wylie Published by Center for American Places, 2009.
The spirit of pietra viva guides this volume. �Living stone� � an oxymoron, but one uniquely descriptive of Italian marble and of the photographs created by William Wylie over six years in the Cava di Gioia quarry. Furthering the language lesson, gioia here should be translated as �joy, delight,� as in a quarry (cava) of pleasures. There are many to be found in this lovely book, certainly one of the sleepers of 2009.
Carrara, by William Wylie. Published by Center for American Places, 2009.
Wylie�s exploration of the
Carrara marble extraction business is a paean to that odd notion of living stone. His own comments are eloquent and simple, and offer a very tangible sense of the artist�s life in these great geometric bites taken out of the Italian mountainsides. Just as sculptors like Michelangelo and Henry Moore found living forms within rock taken from this place, so has Wylie found material for photographs. Like Michelangelo, his vision alights on the cavatori, the men who make their livelihood transforming mountains into building blocks and who, in the photographs, tread a line between their rough-hewn real lives, in which anything made of marble would probably seem ridiculously exorbitant, and their god-like positions as cutters of stone, caked with marble powder that renders them part of it (I wonder what a chemical analysis of their bodies shows, how much marble have they absorbed over time � are they living stone?). Like Moore, he sees Platonic, modernist forms arising within the blocks themselves, and in the transformation wrought upon the mountains in pursuit of this desirable stone, a medium that has so often been brought to life by great artists.
Carrara, by William Wylie. Published by Center for American Places, 2009.
Carrara, by William Wylie. Published by Center for American Places, 2009.
Essayist Eric Scigliano, descended from cavatori, claims that �staring too closely [at the quarry�s rock faces] can induce a wave of vertigo,� a claim borne out in the photographs. It is stunning, and disorienting, to regard this cumulative act of alpine dismantling, to see Wylie�s long views of the surrounding mountains and imagine the living stone within each peak.
Carrara is an instructive and evocative book, well executed to learn from and get lost within.
—George Slade
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