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Paris-based Virginie Khateeb is a portrait, fashion, and documentary photographer who typically shoots in black and white. Her portfolio is packed with brooding models pouting in chrome coloured gardens, their chiselled cheekbones cutting shadows and creating shade—a sort of natural architecture all of their own. Inspired by unscathed, wild beauty, she also occasionally turns her lens on the natural environment—and in 2015 arrived in Northern Italy to photograph a carved out crevasse of raw, snowy white marble.

Titled Deconstruction and created for Swiss photography journal Yet Magazine, the series was shot in Carrara, Italy’s marble mecca just under Genoa. Each image expertly contrasts the Carrara marble’s extraordinary hefty, hard lines with its glossy, tremendous beauty.

There’s a tactility to each shot too—texture and surface are drawn out from the flat frame through dark, painterly colours like gold shadows in the stone, earthy browns, and bottle green trees. From a close up of a splintered wall, to powdery slopes, towering steps, and a panoramic view of the quarry and its neighbouring misty mountains, the smooth surface and weight of the rock crumbles and cracks before you. This is nature’s tour de force evolving and dissolving.

Related: Extraordinary Beauty of Marble Quarries in Italy & Portugal.

[Images © Virginie Khateeb.]

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