When I was in Virginia last week UVA photography professor William Wylie was in charge of looking out for me, and while I was waiting to talk to a group of students he showed me some of the equipment they use and a book of his photographs published last year, Carrara, which included some really lovely black and white photographs of the world-famous marble quarry at Carrara in Tuscany and a number of color portraits of the men who work there. When my wife and I were in Italy a few years ago her cousin from Lucca pointed out the quarries on a drive to the Cinque Terre, and he told us that the prized marble had been being extracted from the hills there since before the Roman times and that Michelangelo found the prized stone for his David there (I vaguely remembered some scene from a pre-adolescent reading of The Agony and the Ecstacy set in Carrara). Much of the late Roman forum was built of Carraran marble. And perhaps most importantly, at the beginning of the most recent James Bond movie, Bond drives his car through the quarries while avoiding the bad guys.

I recall William or someone else saying something about how the marble is nearly gone, and if so he has lovingly documented a dying industry. I really, really liked his portraits of the workers there. I have been working on a few portrait series myself behind the scenes here in Detroit and the work is much more challenging than the architectural stuff I usually do. I love the straight on, full-body portraits of the men in their work clothes, all of them coated with a fine patina of white marble dust. That's how my dad always looked after a day in the shop.

 These men are Italian, so of course there is some worthy fashion going on here (check out that pink shirt and the jaunty hat on the last guy). They sort of remind me of the early Sartorialist portraits, except these are guys I can actually admire (instead of wishing I could push them into an open manhole cover). Wylie uses an 8x10 camera and the quality and craftsmanship really shows in the actual prints. The marble makes one hell of a backdrop.

 

Spending weeks in the Tuscan countryside, eating, drinking, taking large-format photos of hunky Italian marble cutters in a historic location. . .how many times do you bet he's been asked how he got that gig?

Here's a short video he shot on location:

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I read some story a last week about a guy in the Pacific Northwest who maintains one of the last fleets of film photo booths around, and how the number of booths still operating nationwide was depressingly low. We were big fans of all the photo booths at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and my wife lost a mitt full of our developed shots when she left her wallet in some Lebanese Restaurant years ago. So I was disappointed when I took the kids out to Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum only to discover they sold their last film-based photo booth to some eccentric millionaire dressed all in red who took it with him when he moved to Nashville with his supermodel wife.  All they had was one of these digital booths that spits out a print in ten seconds and it's not even close to the same. At least Japanese purikura give you hello kitty-esque options. And this raggedy Mac camera application doesn't cut it either.

Then I read this morning that the Henry Ford museum is digitizing their photo collection and putting it on Flickr, starting with a promising collection of vintage photo booth portraits. I've wasted countless hours in the Library of Congress' digital photo archives and I love it when universities and smaller museums put their collections online, so I'm pretty excited about the Henry Ford doing this (I am a bit obsessive about Henry Ford lore so I hope some of his personal photos go up there). I hope they add to the photo booth collection as well.

Most of the people in these photos are anonymous; some are famous, or rich, or powerful, but you wouldn't know it from their faces. The photo booth is the great equalizer. It reminds us that to its unwavering eye we're all pretty much the same.

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This blog is intended solely to share the things I come across that inspire me. If I have posted a copyrighted image, I have only done so to the extent necessary to comment upon or discuss it; I will always include a link to the original source of the image if that source is online or acknowledge the source if it is in print. If I have reproduced anything of yours here that is copyrighted and you want me to remove it, please do not hesitate to contact me and I will do so right away.