Brick Bearers - Dan Morrison
They dominate parts of the rural horizon, more imposing than any mandir or mosque.
From the framed distance of your train carriage window, or from your taxi ripping down the highway towards someplace nice, their weathered smokestacks loom over the mustard fields and scrub. In a land scattered with discarded antiquity, India’s brick kilns fit right in, apparently abandoned monuments to something colonial, or Mughal maybe, the details half-recalled by local residents and fully ignored by your guidebook.
But come closer, into the dust and radiant heat, and you see these towering chimneys are not ruins at all, but fervent temples to commerce and need.
The kilns consume offerings of coal and mud. They give bricks in return.
Human beings have been firing bricks for more than seven thousand years, and from the Neolithic period to today the basic alchemy of turning pliant clay into rigid structure hasn’t much changed. The core elements remain earth, water, fire. And labor.
Anja Bruehling’s photographs document communities dedicated to the propagation and harvest of hardened clay blocks. Over a period of three years the Chicago-based artist haunted a cluster of brick kilns around Chunar, at town about 40 kilometers south of the holy city of Varanasi.
She has returned with images refreshing for their lack of sentimentality. Bruehling avoids easy shots and the saccharine pull of soiled beauty. She depicts work, the work of women and girls in particular. On these right backs and broad feet cities are raised.
Despite a recent slowdown, the Indian construction market is projected to become the world’s third-biggest by 2025, producing 11.5 million homes a year. This boom will be powered by rising population and increases in household income (and money laundering, which is estimated to support one third of all housing finance). But at bottom it rests upon low-wage and no-wage labor.
Each brick fired in Chunar sells for about seven rupees (ten U.S. cents). Furnaces like these produce about 140 billion bricks a year.
While some brick kilns employ local workers, many others across India rely on bonded migrant families, modern slaves who are trucked in from distant states by corrupt recruiters to work the clay and fire over 15-hour days.
Take Bruehling’s subjects and multiply them across India’s 100,000 kilns. Add the brickworks of Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Conjugate an epic of labor and exploitation.
Dan Morrison
Dan Morrison has reported from South Asia for The New York Times, National Geographic, and other publications. He is the author of ‘The Black Nile’ (Viking, 2010)