Terzo Stato
BYRON GAGO
Red Circle · 2015
Terzo Stato is a triptych of forensic-style photographs of an abandoned quarry on the Tanaro river, near San Martino Alfieri. Shot with the cool conventions of evidence, with perspective and distance set against a signage label that gives each frame its scale, the three images build an elementary order: Part A, gravel; Part B, sand; Part C, mixed stones. All three are the components of cement, photographed at the site of its extraction. The title takes Gilles Clément's Third Landscape: the residual ground, neither untouched wilderness nor protected reserve, that is subordinate, undecided, and perpetually waiting.
The form is a typology because the typology is the argument. The three substrates (gravel, sand, mixed stones) are not a survey of a place; they are cement disassembled, photographed back into its raw components at the exact ground those components were taken from to become cement. Cement is returned to its substrates at the place those substrates left. The triadic order, with the photographic typologies of the Bechers somewhere behind the eye, makes the extraction legible not through pollution or absence but through the materials themselves.
The forensic register is a deliberate refusal. Against the warm-light, abandoned-beauty convention that turns extraction sites into atmospheres, the photographs adopt the cool, scaled, evidentiary look of the police report or the archaeological survey. But forensic photography belongs to the apparatus that documents violence after the fact, for adjudication or for record, and to borrow it here is to position the landscape as a body of evidence in a case that has not been brought. These are photographs offered as evidence the legal system never used, archived against a future that may one day need them.
The citation is not quite exact, and the inexactness matters. In Clément's strict typology the quarry is not the third landscape itself (the residual, unmanaged ground) but its industrial cousin, the délaissé secondaire, the residue left after extraction withdraws. The same question runs through both: what life returns when human management leaves. But the phrase Clément offers as hope, perpetually waiting, holds a second register the early work did not. The waiting that is biodiversity returning to the pit, and the waiting that is the people the extraction left without work, happen on the same ground.
"A quarry is not residual in Clément's strict sense; it is post-industrial. The work uses the quarry to illustrate a category the quarry only partially inhabits, and the slippage is not addressed."
Critical review, 2026
The slippage is real, and I would draw the line now that I did not draw in 2015. In Clément's typology the quarry is a délaissé secondaire: the third landscape's industrial cousin, not the thing itself. I had read Clément with enthusiasm rather than precision. The interest is the same in both: what returns when management withdraws. But the extractive residue carries a politics the unmanaged-by-default landscape does not, and that politics is the truer subject of these photographs.
Terzo Stato
2015
Final work
- Part A — gravel
- C-type lambda print · 50 × 70 cm
01 / 03
Where the work was made matters as much as what it shows. The quarry sits in the Langhe–Monferrato–Roero triangle of Piedmont, ground heavily worked to feed the post-war Italian construction boom. Much of the cement that built the industrial north came from sites like this one. To photograph an abandoned Langhe quarry is to photograph the residue of the miracolo economico: not an abstract third landscape, but one specific extractive geography, left to wait.
Terzo Stato is the earliest of three works that form a cement triangle. This is the field encounter with cement-as-extraction; Giardino is the studio synthesis of cement-as-form; Ipotesi di Giardino is the relation between the body that grows and the matter that extracts. Read together, the three are a single argument about cement: mined, moulded, and set against living things. Terzo Stato is where it begins, at the edge of the pit.
It is the methodological origin of the territorial work that follows. Before the studio pieces remade cement as form, this one met it as extraction, in the field, with a camera borrowing the register of evidence. Much of what the practice later does with landscape begins here, in the decision to treat a worked-out quarry as a site whose materials could be called to testify.
Terzo Stato
2015
Field / context
- Field photography
- Langhe quarry · Tanaro river
01 / 04
