I’ve been working on the Person at Work project recently, my latest shoot was at a quarry near Newquay, which was quite interesting. It was quite difficult to shoot, seeing as I wasn’t allowed to wander around and take photographs of whatever I wanted, I had to stick to one corner at a time and shoot whatever I could from where I was standing. This was all because of some health and safety issues, anyway it was interesting to see a part of Cornwall’s history and legacy if you will. Mining was once the biggest and pretty much only industry in cornwall, which would’ve employed tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people. And now, in 2016, it employs far far less. This was a relatively small operation that dealt primarily with granite. They create a wide range of different size rocks, from large blocks of rock all the way down to just a few millimetres.
So in terms of photographing, I decided to focus on one of the guys in the bulldozer, who’s job it was to organise piles of rock. His name’s Nick, he’s been working there over a decade and the quarry business is just about all he knows. So here’s several of the pictures I got of him and the quarry and a few of the other guys, PS Nick’s the guy with the glasses and hard hat:
In terms of how this shoot went, I definitely think I got some good shots but I realised just who difficult it is to produce compelling images when it’s hard to get close to your subject. Often the action was far away and difficult to capture, but I also learnt that the small opportunities I did have to get close to my subjects, I really made the most of it and snatched up those opportunities.
Black Photos 