Artist Q & A: Richard Barnes
In anticipation of his premiering solo exhibition The Marble Mountain: Extraction and the Sublime, New York based photographer Richard Barnes shares and discusses his origins and influences as a photographer, the many intriguing and even surprising elements of Northern Italy's marble quarries and workshops, and what defines his brand of imagery.
The Marble Mountain: Extraction and the Sublime opens at Bau-Xi Vancouver on November 7 and runs through November 28, 2026.
Richard Barnes, Laocoon and His Sons from Behind, Carrra, Italy. Archival Inkjet Print on Archival Substrate, 2025. 4 sizes.
1. Can you tell us about the genesis of your photographic career? How did you enter this field and who were your influences?
My photographic career begins in 1975 at the University of California, Berkeley, which I attended as an undergraduate. Northern California is not where I am originally from, but I think of it as my spiritual home, although now I divide my time between New York and California. I went to Berkeley to study art at a time when I had just begun to become interested in photography. I quickly learned that few art departments actually taught photography as a course unto itself and Berkeley was no exception. I looked around and discovered that the only place that taught photography was in the journalism department. So I transferred out of studio art and became, for all intent and purposes, a photojournalist. For approximately 3 years I found employment working at the Daily California, the campus newspaper, which was highly respected and actually paid (unusual for a university newspaper).
Just after graduation I was hired on by the local Berkeley newspaper - a good job for a 25-year-old just out of school, but I only stayed there for about a year. I had my own staff car with a police radio and worked the 3-11 PM shift when I would photograph my assignments. My colleagues used to joke that I was the only photojournalist they'd ever met who carried a tripod around on assignment so I guess that was the first indication that I was perhaps not cut out for this career. Simultaneously I began to tire of sticking my camera in the face of someone who least wanted me there. This coupled with the speed and quick turnaround that is required in that world got to me so I started looking for other alternatives. It was only later when I went on to photograph for publications like the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine and National Geographic, that I realized that those early years as a photojournalist were instrumental as to who I became.
Richard Barnes, Quarry Interior in Orange and Black, Carrra, Italy. Archival Inkjet Print on Archival Substrate, 2025. 4 sizes.
2. Architecture is an important and longtime subject in your work. Can you talk about your draw to that?
Following the newspaper work I moved to Japan and started photographing architecture. I met an architect in Tokyo who was doing a book, and he asked if I’d consider taking photographs for him to be used in the book - he got me access to so many places. Access is really important in a lot of what I do now and it began back then in Japan. My visual aesthetic was formed by the year-and-a-half spent in Japan where I was photographing architecture and thinking about how the Japanese consider space in an eastern sense as opposed to how we experience it in the west. A lot of what I learned there comes through in my work today - The Glass House project [former home of the late architect Philip Johnson, photographed by Barnes during an installation by fog sculptor Fujiko Nakaya] is architecture with a twist. The Unabomber’s cabin [photographed by Barnes in 1998] is architecture at its most elemental. And The Marble Mountain series, currently on view, has partial roots in this interest in architecture and monumentality.
When I came back to the States I moved to New York and went to Parsons to see about enrolling in a graduate school photo program. The photography instructor took a look at my portfolio, which was primarily based on work I'd done in Japan, and he said, "You don't need to go to graduate school, just keep doing what you're doing." So I did. I started photographing for myself and built up a practice photographing architecture for architects and magazines which back then everything was on film and technically very demanding. In the late 90s, tiring of the grind of photographing for architects and wanting to do more personal projects I applied for and got a job on an archaeological excavation run by the Yale/University of Pennsylvania excavations in Egypt.
I traveled to Egypt for three dig seasons and worked with archaeologists as the on site excavation photographer. I have always been interested in what lies hidden from view waiting to be discovered and brought to light. Around this time, simultaneously doing the commercial work, I had my first gallery exhibitions and the genesis of an art practice. Working on excavation sites in Egypt had nearly as profound effect on me as my time spent in Japan and influenced how I see and relate to the world visually. It's interesting that those early experiences - you think you've left them behind, but they're kind of always there.
Richard Barnes, Shrouded Marble Figures, Milan. Archival Inkjet Print on Archival Substrate, 2023. 4 sizes.
3. What do you see as the difference between photojournalism and your individual practice as a photographer?
First, I have the greatest respect for photojournaIists and what they bring to the table by exposing inequalities, covering war, etc. often putting themselves in harms way, but I am not so interested in documentation - I am concerned with augmenting the document and by that I mean I'm interested in looking at a given situation and instead of trying to define it I want to understand it in its complexity, from as many angles as possible. I am also concerned with ambiguity and photojournalism is not. I appreciate when one is confronted by image that may at first not be fully understood, causing one to look deeper and hopefully spend more time with it.
Photojournalism is about getting to the essence of a subject quickly and without obfuscation. It is the opposite of ambiguous but art is often about ambiguity and when it works and I'm engaged it takes me to a whole different place than where photojournalism wants to go. There is a wonderful irreverent quote that I have had for years pinned up over my desk by Tristan Zara, the Dadist, which reads, "Any work of art that can be understood is the product of a journalist". Of course taken at face value this is absurd, (the Dadists reveled in absurdity), but it also represents a deeper truth for me, one that asks more questions than it gives answers for and I don't think photojournalism is about that. So, in this lies the difference.
Richard Barnes, Space Man (F. Tincolini) in Process, Fantiscritti, Carrara. Archival Inkjet Print on Archival Substrate, 2022. 4 sizes.
4. How did you conceive of the idea for the Carrara series?
It started out as another project - I was hired by National Geographic to photograph in Carrara as one part of a much larger assignment that took over three years to finish. That project was about the repatriation of artifacts back to their original countries of creation after having been looted by other nations, (primarily Europeans and Americans).
One of the last things that my editor had me do was go to a Carrara sculpture studio to photograph the carving of a very specific piece of sculpture that a team from Oxford, UK had scanned of the Elgin or Parthenon marbles on permanent display in the British museum. Lord Elgin had rescued?, (the Greeks would say stole), sculptures that made up a frieze running across the top register of the Parthenon in the early 19th century and for decades they have petitioned the British museum to return them. It turned out the sculptural fragment was being robotically carved from a block of Greek marble, which was intended to show that the British Museum could easily reproduce the entirety of the famous frieze from the Parthenon and therefore send the original Elgin Marbles back to Athens replacing it with its replica.
I had never encountered stone sculpture being created by a robot and it brought up all kinds of questions for me about process, authenticity and reproduction and I knew immediately there was something there for me personally that I wanted to explore. The studio owners said to me, "if you want to come back we'll take you around and show you what we do.” Four years later and that’s how it became a personal project and book due out in 2027
Richard Barnes, Double Vestia (F. Tincolini), Fantiscritti, Carrara. Archival Inkjet Print on Archival Substrate, 2022. 4 sizes.
5. Can you talk about the technical side of the preparation process for photographing these quarries? How complex was the process of gaining access to these areas, and how involved was your equipment list?
My camera is digital, I transitioned from film years ago and I always work on a tripod. I also used a fairly simple lighting kit in the field. The first time I went with National Geographic, I had an assistant. After that, I went on my own for the next three, four - I've been there probably eight times now. The last three visits including just recently, I brought my assistant, Ernesto. Ernesto is Argentinean, but his mother is Italian, so he speaks fluent Italian and was able to translate as I do not speak the language. He has been invaluable in this process.
Richard Barnes, The Measured Mountain, Carrara, Italy. Archival Inkjet Print on Archival Substrate, 2025. 4 sizes.
6. Were there any significant challenges you encountered in photographing this body of work?
There is a significant expense with doing this kind of work, when it becomes your own project - I have used the income I make from print sales and editorial projects to fund my travel to Italy on my own dime for the last three, four, five times over there. Prior to Ernesto being with me, the language barrier was also a challenge.
Additionally, on the ground working, you've got these giant trucks going by transporting huge blocks of marble and they're not looking out for you. So something could and has happened. But while everything is generally quite safe, there are moments where you wonder, is there going to be a landslide? Am I going to be hit by a truck? Fortunately, nothing that calamitous has ever occurred. I tended to work on weekends because all the workers and the trucks are off and not in the quarries. On the weekends, I had the freedom to go almost anywhere I wanted to go. During the week I would work in the studios or the workshops.
Richard Barnes, Canova Cupid and Psyche in the Yard, Fantiscritti, Carrara. Archival Inkjet Print on Archival Substrate, 2022. 4 sizes.
7. With this side of industry, production, and resource extraction that most people never see or think about, what do you hope to impress upon viewers of this series and what is one of the more surprising facts about marble extraction that you found?
I think of it in macro and micro terms – The macro part is that this is the longest running industrialized extraction project that I am aware of in the world. Marble extraction here has been happening for over 2,000 years, since Etruscan times, before the Romans, and it still goes on. Environmentally and ecologically, it's somewhat of a disaster. At the same time, this is the region's main industry and it is still one of the leading sources of marble in the world. Interestingly, the government is trying to curb the industry and limit how many quarries can be opened, despite the stone representing the livelihood of
thousands of the region’s people, you can’t just simply say you are not allowed to excavate here anymore, and there are tensions between environmentalists who want to shut it all down and the people who earn their livelihood from working in the quarries and their ancestors have lived for centuries in the towns below the mountain often working in the quarries.
The micro aspect is what's happening in the sculpture studios and with the artisans who have worked in this part of Italy for hundreds of years carving stone in the traditional way. It turns out that Michelangelo had sourced his marble blocks from these very same quarries I have been photographing in. He spent years in the Apuan alps choosing his blocks, excavating for the purest of white marble called Statuario. Later he built roads to transport the stone down the mountain to a port to then be shipped to Florence or Rome before he would finally start carving. A sculpture such as the Pietà or the David would take years to finish, even with teams of apprentices that the workshops employed some 5 centuries ago. Now, it takes a couple of weeks for a machine to knock out a sculpture, and that, to me brings up a lot of questions around what happens to the creative process when time is compressed and a work of art is realized via a digital scan, then carved by a machine. What is lost in the production of a sculpture when the artist is removed from the equation and a robot takes over? I am not so naive to realize we live in the 21st century and technology, the tools of our time, have freed up the artist to think more conceptually and perhaps less about process and materials, but there are questions as to what happens when a sculptor is no longer responsive to the geological aberrations, the flaws, or nuances presented by a block of marble that might cause him or her to alter the course of a carving or abandon the block altogether when control is given over to a machine? And with the rise of AI this is only going to become more of question for art historians to ponder over.
Something I find most surprising is that the making of sculpture represents only a tiny amount of where all this marble is ultimately going - most of it ends up as road gravel, or as an abrasive in toothpaste, or into makeup and paper products. That's the reality of the extraction of marble - only a tiny fraction is going to creating marble sculptures, or countertops and building facades. That's something that I think people never remotely consider when they think of Carrara – That they have been brushing their teeth with marble sourced from these mountains!
Richard Barnes, Abandoned Quarry, Salamander (with Lone Tree), Apuan Alps. Archival Inkjet Print on Archival Substrate, 2022. 4 sizes.
8. Can you tell us about the photo Abandoned Quarry (Salamander) with Lone Tree? How did a salamander make its way into the title?
The government actually was responsible for shutting this quarry down. It was discovered to be the exclusive habitat of a salamander species that only existed here and the area was deemed environmentally and ecologically sensitive so to their credit the Italian government shut it down.
In some ways it’s a hopeful thing that they considered the wildlife over the potential for monetizing the marble extracted from this particular quarry.
Richard Barnes, Laocoon, Carrara. Archival Inkjet Print on Archival Substrate, 2023. 4 sizes.
9. How do you interpret the demands for these reproductions in the current age of economic and environmental uncertainty? Can the answer be encapsulated as the life of an object versus the life of an idea, where the initial idea of the sculpture conceived by Canova for example, then gets perpetuated through these reproductions, and does it take away from the initial creation? What does it say about how much people care about authenticity?
I think we all want to surround ourselves with beautiful things (although some of us would deny that), and these reproductions are beautiful classical/Renaissance forms. If someone is wealthy enough that they can have one sculpted and they want to collect reproductions from artists of the past such as Canova, Michelangelo or others, then by all means have at it!
It is, however, more than a little bizarre to think of people wanting to buy their own Michelangelo copy and place it in their garden when there are original Michelangelos that are contained in museum collections in Italy and abroad. We exist in an age of mechanical reproduction to borrow from Benjamin, and it is not surprising to me that collectors would want to possess robotically created reproductions of an original priceless unattainable object.
On the other hand, contemporary sculpture being produced in Carrara's studios is often about the idea rather than the idealized classical form and sometimes its about both. Carrara and the other towns in this marble region maintain a thriving businesses producing sculpture in both analog and digital forms, but what really interests me is what is the role of the artist when technology takes center stage such as in robotically created art, how technology transforms the artwork, and also transforms the way the artists thinks and works.
Richard Barnes, Michelangelo Quarry with Painting and 2 Figures, Carrara. Archival Inkjet Print on Archival Substrate, 2023. 4 sizes.
10. Is introducing an awareness of what's happening your main objective for viewers of this work - getting them to think more consciously about the role of technology and their own cultural consumption practices?
Yes. I want people to think about what it means to be an artist in our time with all this incredible technology available to us. What is lost and conversely gained in the process of creating code and then a scan to be uploaded to a robot to execute the work of art? What happens when speed is an overwhelming factor and the robot doesn't need to sleep of eat? I am attempting to stay neutral here and acknowledge that technology can be our friend, a tool in cutting out the drudgery of having to do manual, (translate to - as by hand) mean and in our post Duchampian age, let the concept of a work of art take center stage. Of equal importance in my photographs is the question of marble extraction and how sustainable this is in a place like the Apuan alps above Carrara? Can a landscape that has been scoured and abraded, sometimes beyond recognition, be sustainable and how long can we continue on this path? I want this work to create more questions than answers. I want people to start thinking, "Wow, I didn't know that this extraction process even existed, and sculpture was being created by robots, and that marble extraction has been going on for over 2000 years?”