The snow in August

Carrara is a small town of about 60,000 inhabitants located along the coast of northern Tuscany, between the Ligurian Sea and the Alpi Apuane. Famous for its landscape dominated by white mountains characterized by open-air marble basins.
The precious white Marble has been extracted for over 2000 years in over 200 quarries.
The landscape of the Carrara quarries is the consequence of the interaction between man and the environment. In the course of history, a gradual morphological change has taken place, starting from the original natural conditions of a few white rocks until the present day with an impressive increase in size of the marble areas, which gave rise to a unique scenario in the world whose sight arouses astonishment and wonder so much that it remains almost breathless in size and spectacular nature. In any season you enter these areas you have the feeling of being surrounded by snow-capped mountains.The processing is more and more industrial and less and less traditional.Thanks to the technological evolution both the extraction techniques of the marble blocks from the mountain have been modified, with the use of diamond wire cutting machines, and the processing with the new robots, which are able to reproduce innumerable even very complex shapes.But among these mountains, scattered here and there in the now dusty laboratories, the marble is still worked by a few dozen sculptors, covered with white powder that almost blend with the statues, but with great tenacity and above all infinite passion do not give up advance of progress and continue to sculpt it with their own hands.I focused my photographs on some views of the quarries, but especially on one of the oldest sculpture workshops in Carrara, focusing on the portraits and details of these men who work and live this reality, passing on the art of sculpture from generation to generation since 1960, sculpting marble statues for the entire world market.

Riccardo Dalle Luche