AA-2026-0440BB
On the image
A dusty excavation or quarry operation captures the moment when someone decided that manual labour in the open air, under a wall of exposed rock and sparse vegetation, was worth documenting on colour film—a choice that suggests this was not ordinary work but something worth recording as progress or achievement. Two figures in dark clothes move across the pale, rocky ground, and a wooden ladder leans against the slope like a piece of equipment from a century of human digging. The blue-painted objects scattered across the site—buckets, perhaps, or markers—are the kind of practical detail that appears in photographs taken by government agents, engineers, or surveyors, not casual visitors. The raw cliff face, striped with the pale tones of exposed earth, rises above like the evidence of extraction: stone, soil, or mineral removed in service of some industrial or infrastructural agenda that the photographer believed worth capturing in color when colour film was still expensive and used judiciously. This was work that someone thought mattered enough to use good film on.
Visually related — by likeness
Quarry or Excavation Site with Workers, mid-20th Century. 1940–1965. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-0440BB. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/quarry-or-excavation-site-with-workers-mid-20th-century.
@misc{aaAA20260440BB,
title = {Quarry or Excavation Site with Workers, mid-20th Century},
year = {1940–1965},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-0440BB},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/quarry-or-excavation-site-with-workers-mid-20th-century}
}TY - ART TI - Quarry or Excavation Site with Workers, mid-20th Century PY - 1940–1965 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-0440BB UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/quarry-or-excavation-site-with-workers-mid-20th-century ER -
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