 |
The Quarry. By Madeleine Morlet & Vivian Ewing.
 |
Photographs by Madeleine Morlet
Short story by Vivian Ewing
Self-published, 2022. In English. 20 pp., 13.75x20".
Quarry. A large, deep open-air hole from which slate, limestone or granite is extracted through digging or blasting. It’s also a word used to describe prey, the aim of an attack.
The Quarry refers to both place and victim. It’s not a photobook as such, rather, a newspaper, and it contains less pictures than one might expect from either. There are a sweet sixteen of them, around which wraps the story of teenage girls who return home a week apart for their first summer break from college. But the pictures are not sweet and nor is the story. They are dark and light and beautiful and tragic. Photographer Madeleine Morlet and writer Vivian Ewing twist elements of myth-making, murder ballads, psychological horror and romance novel in broadsheet form, a shrewd choice as broadsheets tend to be more solemn and less sensationalist than tabloids.
Morlet depicts with rigor and love the community of young friends who live in the picturesque but ominous coastal Maine landscape to which she relocated from London in 2017. Even without Ewing’s words, divided into nine sections and which I only read after several weeks of looking, Morlet’s pictures feel weighted with rocks. They are implications, and what heightens their effect on me is the extreme care taken in pairing and sequencing. The pairs are like besties, any flaws or differences serving to make each other stronger. The images, all color and made during the summer of 2021, appear meticulously crafted while maintaining an innocent snapshot quality. Sometimes the best photographs are like having good fashion sense: it looks effortless but is almost insanely hard. It’s not about having the coolest equipment or a big budget, it’s about being an expert and generous observer.
 |
When I ask Morlet about the work she describes “feeling a kinship with the adolescent experience” and writes of “domestic departure and return.” I dwell on domestic, the idea of the local and internality but also family. I learn that Morlet and Ewing, who completed her undergraduate studies in Maine, came to know each other through this project, collaborating for six months and talking almost weekly.
More than half the photographs are close range or taken from atypical angles, either low to the ground, or looking up, along or through something. Faces and especially eyes are often protected, blurred or concealed. Though our eyes are wondrous things, they have limits as do photographs, and when we can’t see our brain steps in and fills in the blanks. That’s what I found compelling about The Quarry: I was continuously anticipating what I would see or feel next. Where parts of images are obstructed through shielding or cropping, I still had a specific expectation of what the ‘story’ would look like in the end (I was wrong). Morlet’s lush photographs are like a collection of stills from a coming-of-age movie trailer. They tempt, like the quarry and its abandoned equipment and intense cold water Ewing writes about. Morlet herself describes them as “a call and response to Vivian’s writing” which “permeated my thoughts…and brought an element of fiction to the experience of capturing my subjects as themselves.”
 |
The photographs don’t look like the ones printed in my local newspaper that I used to clip and stick to my walls — Morlet’s are finer — but as she points out, it’s less common practice now. Teenagers favor scrolling over buying newspapers or magazines, something I think about in noticing the two images with cell phones in The Quarry. But technology and contemporary life are present: false eyelashes, vaping, Reeboks, nose rings, a Subaru, a padlock-as-pendant and a letter bead necklace that spells out O-W-N quiver octaves below the trees, flowers, ropes and siding that dot the landscape around the quarry.
Every town has a place of legend and danger. Often it involves water. Think of all the books, songs or films you know where water is the backdrop for an atmospheric thriller. What makes The Quarry special is how Morlet and Ewing mine the aches and dreads of being a teenage girl and merge them with the exquisiteness of desire and freedom and the costs thereof. Their use of water as both character and characteristic. And the undercurrent of the pictures suggesting that what we can’t see can’t hurt us.
Purchase Book
Read More Book Reviews
 |
 |
