Carrière aux Sables de Macherin

The granite quarries at the edge of Fontainebleau Forest, on the Arbonne plane near Macherin, provided cobblestones for the new boulevards of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s. Here, the piles of freshly cut stone look more like the ruins of a past civilization in a barren landscape beneath a foreboding sky than the building blocks of an emerging imperial capital. At the edge of the this road, quarrymen have built a shelter of rejected blocks.

Credit: Purchase, Harriette and Noel Levine Gift and Rogers Fund, 1996