AA-2026-BF299C
On the image
Somebody decided this particular wall of scraped-out chalk deserved a permanent record, and so a man in a pale shirt lifts a compact camera to eye level whilst a companion in a white t-shirt studies something in his own hands, possibly a rock sample, possibly just his fingers. Quarries like this one were being worked hard through the 1960s for cement, lime, or road material, and a field visit meant somebody with a clipboard and somebody with a camera, because paperwork alone never satisfied a supervisor back at the office.
The scale of the cut is doing all the talking here: a man-height slope of pale spoil rearing up behind two people who look, by comparison, like an afterthought. Nobody thought to bring a hard hat, which was standard practice at the time and would raise eyebrows now. Whatever the camera captured that day was probably filed away and never looked at again until this very sentence.
There is a comic dignity in documenting a hole in the ground with the same seriousness other people reserved for weddings and christenings. The man behind the lens is not admiring anything. He is doing his job, and his job, this particular afternoon, was making sure the company had proof the chalk face looked exactly like this before somebody blew it up or dug it out.
The historian's note
The scene shows a mineral or aggregate extraction site, most likely a chalk, marl, or similar soft-rock quarry, being inspected and photographically recorded during ordinary operations. Field documentation of working faces was routine practice at extraction sites in the mid-twentieth century, used for geological surveying, progress records, or safety assessment.
The absence of protective headgear, the informal dress, and the use of a small handheld camera are consistent with standard industrial and geological fieldwork of the 1960s, a period before hard-hat regulations and formal site-safety documentation became universally enforced in quarrying and mining operations across much of the industrialised world.
No specific quarry, company, or location can be established from the available evidence.
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Two Men Photographing a Chalk or Marl Quarry Face, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-BF299C. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-men-photographing-a-chalk-or-marl-quarry-face-1960s.
@misc{aaAA2026BF299C,
title = {Two Men Photographing a Chalk or Marl Quarry Face, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-BF299C},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-men-photographing-a-chalk-or-marl-quarry-face-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Two Men Photographing a Chalk or Marl Quarry Face, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-BF299C UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-men-photographing-a-chalk-or-marl-quarry-face-1960s ER -
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