"The spirit of pietra viva—living stone—guides this lovely volume. An oxymoron, it is uniquely describes Italian marble and the photographs created by William Wylie. . . . Carrara is an instructive and evocative book, well executed to learn from and get lost in."
—George Slade, photo-eye magazine

"This book is the culmination of Wylie's multiyear artistic project at the famous Italian marble quarry, a project which included the awarding of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Memorial Fellowship in Photography in 2005, the production of four films (Dust, Cavatori, Friction, and The Block) in 2008, and exhibitions in New York City, San Francisco, and Richmond. On first glance Wylie appears to be documenting a site whose name resounds in the history of art as the source of marble for Michelangelo or a refuge for John Singer Sargent, but in fact his Carrara project resists a documentary reading. Rather than documenting a cultural site and its excavation, Wylie's aesthetic labor presents us with a series of singularities (elemental marble blocks, portraits of quarry workers at rest) that transmits not merely cultural or even natural history, but temporality as such. Each time-image, composed of intense focus and caesura, presents a "bloc of sensation" that renders visible the contested and open terrain of the history of photography."
—Jae Emerling, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte