Gehouwen steen in steengroeve nabij Baalbek, Libanon Possibly 1925

A.G.A. van Eelde made this photograph of a quarry near Baalbek in Lebanon, using a camera and gelatin silver printing sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. The range of tones here is really subtle; this almost monochrome palette gives it a timeless quality. It’s like looking at the moon. I keep coming back to the surface of the hewn stone. It’s so smooth, almost blank, but full of potential, like a huge canvas. In the foreground, there’s a family of dark shapes, almost like an inky blob, standing in the quarry. It makes me wonder about the scale of what we are seeing. This photo reminds me of those stark, early landscape photographs by Carleton Watkins, where the sheer scale of the American West dwarfs the tiny figures of the explorers. It’s that same feeling of human endeavor set against something ancient and immense. Art, like history, is an ongoing process of chipping away at the stone, revealing new forms and ideas.