Hard industrial beauty

Top: Granite quarry, Graniteville, VT. I went time and again to this Rock of Ages quarry, past the “No Trespassing” signs, to shoot in different light and seasons. Someone who saw my photos said they resembled Edward Burtynsky’s—only not as good. Turns out, they were right on both counts. He had included this quarry in his gorgeous exploration of quarries around the world.

The working quarry yields high-quality, clear, grey granite valued for monuments, gravestones, and buildings. Nearly 600 feet deep, it is the world's largest operating deep-hole, dimension granite quarry.

The quarry industry used to be a hotbed of radical labor. Immigrant Italian carvers and Swedish stonemasons worked the sheds and mines. The former tended to anarchism, the latter to socialism, and they fought each other as hard as they battled the owners and the silicosis their working conditions made common and lethal.

Below: View from a second floor window in the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, looks out on a building site across 53rd St. The giant figure apparently leaning against the construction is actually the reflection of a sculpture inside the museum. And the shadow is me, taking the shot.