Marble extraction in the Italian Apuan Alps has been known since Roman times, and its historical importance is symbolized by masterpieces of Western art history. However, the Carrara marble industry has recently received harsh criticism for operating in the protected area of the Apuan Alps Regional Park, recognized by UNESCO since 2015. Environmental and social concerns about mining have arisen from the extreme acceleration of all the productive phases of the extractive industry. From the mid-twentieth century, the exploitation of geological deposits of marble grew exponentially thanks to the development of powerful extraction technologies and a global export economy that creates only relatively few occupations in Carrara.
Within this context, photographic and cinematographic projects have increasingly focused on the environmental risks created by the marble mining industry. This article shows how visual representations of Carrara have changed in recent years via an analysis of three case studies: the internationally acclaimed documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018), the climbing project and Italian short film Carie (Cavity 2019), and Lorenzo Shoubridge’s naturalistic photographs in Apuane: terre selvagge (Apuan Wildlands 2018).
These case studies offer an innovative perspective on the landscapes of marble extraction. Previously, these landscapes were represented following other visual trends emphasizing the technological sublime found in the geometric shapes of the white quarries, the working conditions of marble laborers, and the myth of the purity of marble used in artistic sculptures. The three examples analyzed in this paper attempt to go ‘beyond the whiteness’ by focusing on the scale of environmental destruction (Anthropocene: The Human Epoch), the more-thanhuman perspective (Apuane terre selvagge), and the social struggle for preserving a mountain region through creative solutions (Carie). In other words, new aesthetic and ethical sensibilities are challenging established twentieth-century narratives of the Carrara marble quarries by focusing on a new element: the environment.
Cover image: Saverio Salvioni, Cava di Ravaccione, 1810–1813 (Source: Archivio di Stato Massa e Pontremoli)
References
Adams, Robert. New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. Rochester, New York: International Museum of Photography, 1975.
Burtynsky, Edward, and Michael Mitchell. Edward Burtynsky - Quarries. Göttingen: Steidl, 2007.
Burtynsky, Edward, Lori Pauli, Mark Haworth-Booth, and Michael Torosian. Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada in assoc. with Yale Univ. Press, 2003.
Cesaretti, Enrico. “Apua Ma(t)ter. Narratives of Marble.” In Elemental Narratives: Reading Environmental Entanglements in Modern Italy, 90–123. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020.
Gowin, Emmet. Changing the Earth: Aerial Photographs. New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery in assoc. with the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 2002.
Leitch, Alison. “The Life of Marble: The Experience and Meaning of Work in the Marble Quarries of Carrara.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1996): 235–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1835-9310.1996.tb00330.x. ———. “Materiality of Marble: Explorations in the Artistic Life of Stone.” Thesis Eleven 103, no. 1 (2010.): 65–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513610381375.
Newman, Cathy, and Pierre Boulat. “Carrara Marble: Touchstone of Eternity.” National Geographic, July 1982.
Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.
Nye, David E., and Sarah S. Elkind, eds. The Anti-Landscape. Studies in Environmental Humanities. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014.
Paribeni, Emanuela, and Simonetta Segenni. “Le cave di Carrara e la proprietà imperiale.” In Studi classici e orientali LX (2014): 307-328.
Papapetros, Spyros. “The Quarry and the Tower: Filming Marble’s Architectural Anticipations.” In The Aesthetics of Marble: From Late Antiquity to the Present, edited by Dario Gamboni, Gerhard Wolf, and Jessica N. Richardson, 294–311. München: Hirmer, 2021.
Piccolo, Denis. “Carie.” The Pill. Living Life in Nature, February 2020.
Pizziolo, Giogio, and Manlio Summer. Verso Il Parco delle Apuane: programma sperimentale per l’attivazione del Parco. Firenze: La casa Usher, 1984.
Primavori, Pietro. “Carrara Marble: A Nomination for ‘Global Heritage Stone Resource’ from Italy.” Geological Society 407 (2015): 137-154. https://doi.org/10.1144/SP407.21
Pritchard, Sara B. “Dangerous Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, and Power in Anthropocene: The Human Epoch.” Environmental History 25, no. 2 (2020): 377–382. https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emz086.
Rifkind, David. The Radical Politics of Marble in Fascist Italy. London, New York: Routledge, 2018.
Renger-Patzsch, Albert. Gestein: Photographien Typischer Beispiele von Gesteinen aus europäischen Ländern. Ingelheim am Rhein: C.H. Boehringer Sohn, 1966.
Rovelli, Marco. Il contro in testa. Roma: Laterza, 2012.
Rust, Stephen, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, eds. Ecomedia: Key Issues. London, New York: Routledge, 2015.
Sandoz, Marie, and Anne-Katrin Weber, eds. L'image verticale. Politiques de la vue aérienne. Transbordeur 6, Paris: Éditions Macula, 2022. https://transbordeur.ch/fr/2022/.
Scott, Conohar. “The Politics of the Sublime(s).” In Photography and Environmental Activism: Visualising the Struggle Against Industrial Pollution, 121–37. London, New York: Routledge, 2022.
Stevens, Shannon, and Richard Wainwright. “Review of ‘The Anthropocene Project’: Treachery in Images.” Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal 5 (2020), no. 2: 567–84. https://doi.org/10.18432/ari29496.
Vatteroni, Gino. Dalle Apuane alle Green Mountains: Anarchismo ed anarchici tra Carrara e il Vermont (1888-1910). Spoleto: Edizioni Monte Bove, 2019.
Zylinska, Joanna. Nonhuman Photography. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The MIT Press, 2017.
