The Quarry Project

The Quarry Project is a continuation of my 20-year practice investigating the properties of black-and-white photography and how it creates abstraction from realism. These quarry photographs are a study in duality and tension. They comprise a deep exploration of the familiarity of place, the quarries near my home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, yet contain a longing to be transported to another world, a larger life, even infinity. They straddle a space between truth and fiction, between the exterior and interior, between fact and dream. Although rooted in landscape, they are self-portraits, revealing a state of mind, more psychological and emotional than pragmatic. The sense of mystery and the desire for the unknown create an ongoing dichotomy – we think we are looking up, yet we are really looking down. We think we see the sky, but instead we see the water. What appears to be a mountain, is actually a rock. The bottomless black void is filled with reflection and imagination. In society right now—with the pandemic, war, the dire effects of climate change and a dangerous political theater—meaning is breaking down, language has lost its meaning and we are left in a perpetual state of questioning. The Quarry Project embraces this confusion, allows for projection and the possibility that a negative space can be beautiful.