Photographing in caves, mines, and other structures beyond the penetration of daylight is closely tied to the development of artificial light and flash, some of which was designed specifically for underground use.
In December 1861 Félix Nadar experimented with battery-powered arc lights in the Paris catacombs. His collodion plates were prepared and developed underground, where exposures of eighteen minutes were required to record mannequins with the bones. His pictures proved an astounding success, but the cumbersome, dangerous lights were far from ideal.
Then and later, limelight, Bengal light, and other chemicals were tried without success, but once magnesium was commercially available photographers found a new means of challenging darkness. On 27 January 1865, with a five-minute exposure, Alfred Brothers (1826-1912) produced a stereo view in the Blue John Caverns in Derbyshire, England; it was imperfect, and a second exposure was prevented by the choking clouds of fumes, but the experiment was clearly a success. Henry Jackson was the first to create an underground photograph in a mine when he worked in Bradford Colliery in March 1865, and in April that year Charles Piazzi Smyth, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, used great bundles of magnesium wire to photograph the interior of the Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt.
Although ruinously expensive, magnesium was the only practicable light source for underground use, and in 1866 the Belgian-born immigrant Charles Waldack (c.1831-1882) photographed in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, employing up to 120 tapers to generate each of about 80 negatives. Forty of these were marketed as stereo views and drew universal acclaim. Waldack set a benchmark for underground photography, overcoming the same problems that daunted both his predecessors and later workers, and developing techniques that remain guiding tenets today. He placed lights to the side of the camera, both to create relief and to avoid light bouncing directly back into the lens from the humid, dust-laden air. Typically, a tripod-mounted camera was used with a wide-angle lens, which was uncapped while the magnesium burned.
In subsequent decades most underground photographers were driven by commercial motives, such as advertising or producing pictures for sale, though in Australia government cave protection promoted underground photography for documentation. Even so, cave photography did not flourish until the invention of flashpowder in 1887. Underground photography was generally conducted in tourist caves, not least because the sale of pictures was assured. The move to recording caves during their exploration only came with the 1890s, and the efforts of the Frenchman Édouard Alfred Martel (1859-1938; but notable also were Charles Kerry (1857-1928) in Australia, Ben Hains in the USA, and J. Charles Burrow (1852-1914) working in Cornish tin mines). Henceforth, cave exploration generally demanded a photographer's presence, one of the best being James Henry (‘Harry’) Savory (1889-1962) in the UK.
Caves, by their nature, are fascinating and mysterious; not surprisingly, therefore, such photographs are avidly devoured by an awed public. In the USA Ray V. Davis (1894-1980) extensively photographed in what was later named Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, where he used a mortar-like device to fire magnesium powder; the pictures of vast chambers led directly to the cave's designation as a National Park in 1923.
Magnesium, with its billowing clouds of smoke, went into decline after the introduction of flashbulbs, though publicity was required to aid their acceptance. In 1952 Ennis Creed (‘Tex’) Helm (1903-82), a newspaper photographer, was sponsored by Sylvania to demonstrate the worth of their bulbs. Helm used 2, 400 flashbulbs connected by 5 km (3 miles) of cable to expose a single picture in the Big Room, Carlsbad Caverns; National Geographic noted that this was the most vivid flash since the atomic bomb was fired in 1945.
While photography has today turned almost exclusively to electronic flash, cave photographers often combine this source with stockpiled flashbulbs (which ceased to be manufactured in the 1980s) for their characteristics of high power and wide spread from large reflectors. Photographers also take advantage of their slower speed of illumination for depicting fluid motion in water, and of their ability to fire underwater.
Modern cave photography still uses many 19th-century techniques, with one major exception. Slave units detect a pulse of light from a flash and trigger a second flashgun at a remote location, thus enabling synchronized multiple-flash photography without the requirement for connecting cables. Since the 1970s cavers have developed highly sensitive infrared slaves specifically calibrated for total darkness, generally fired by a pulse from the camera position to avoid foreground lighting. This has removed the need for a cumbersome tripod and made multiple flash photographs easy to set up, creating unparalleled possibilities.
— Chris Howes
Bibliography
- Howes, C., To Photograph Darkness (1989).
- Howes, C., Images Below (1997)
