Two Figures Surveying a Quarry Face, 1960s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Two Figures Surveying a Quarry Face, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Two Figures Surveying a Quarry Face, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-A7A697

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Somebody has excavated a very large hole out of what used to be a hillside, and two people in tidy shirts have walked to the middle of it to look at the wall of broken rock as though it might explain itself. This is the standard pose of quarry inspection in the 1960s: hands loose, feet planted, the confidence of men who assume that scale alone confirms the work is going well.

No machinery is visible in the frame, which was normal enough â€” a photograph taken between shifts, when the only sound was wind moving through the pit and the operation looked, for a moment, like something more contemplative than an industrial dig. The white shirt suggests this was not a working miner but a visitor, an engineer, or an owner, the kind of man whose job was to arrive occasionally and approve of what other people had already done.

The hillside above them still carries scrub trees along its crest, the last green line before the rock takes over, a reminder that the whole pit used to be surface, not depth. Someone, at some point, decided that ground was more valuable underneath than on top, and here is the resulting crater, being admired by two men who had nothing to do with digging it.

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