A few years ago we published a photo essay exploring creative director and image-maker Jethro Marshall’s Coastal Brutalism book, a photographic study into seaside concrete and how the material has been used in civil defence and engineering on the eroding coastline of south-west England.

Since then, Jethro has published three more books in the series: Nightlife, a study of night-time flora in Dorset; This is Hardcore, a set of roadscapes that render the man-made arteries that snake through the countryside in sculptural, sinuous beauty; and Halls and Oats, which eyes up 30 village halls, revealing them as quiet centres of rural life. In each, Jethro comes good on West Country Modern’s “Anti-bucolic, pro-rural, modern studies on English landscape” objective, one that neither reveres the natural world nor condemns the manmade. “I’m attempting to reframe the rural as a surprising environment, where the relationship between nature and the manmade can be complex and inspiring,” Jethro told us last time.

In his final book in the West Country Modern series, Jethro has set his lens on West Country quarries, where granite, gravel, limestone, aggregates and sandstone are hauled from the earth, leaving negative space in the landscape. This ‘architecture of subtraction’ – seemingly about what’s taken away, rather than created – is, as architect and critic Sam Jacob puts it in his introductory essay, ‘a form of land art that reveals something else.’ That something else is the meeting of the Earth’s geology with the ‘values of the civilised world.’ It’s the material, physical stuff of architecture laid bare – the literal building blocks of the built environment in their raw states. As Jacob observes:

“For every block there is its antiblock. Its absence elsewhere. The Empire Quarry, Bloomington, Indiana, for example provided the stone for the Empire State Building. It’s now 207,000 cubic feet of empty space with sheer cut walls falling to a blue lake below. To repurpose Newton’s third law, for every presence, there is an equal and opposite absence. For every Empire State there is an equal and opposite Empire void.”

Jethro, in Rocky, has shown how beautiful this void can be.