ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

CRAMPED into a narrow limestone passage with water dribbling down your
neck and mud and grit coating clothing and equipment alike, you might be
forgiven for thinking that cave photography is a form of a particularly
unpleasant torture. Camera failures are many, and successful results are
few.

Enthusiasts now have the advantages of 150 years of development of photography.
They can fire flashguns remotely using slave units (electronic gadgets that
detect infrared light beamed from the camera to trigger a flash elsewhere);
cameras are smaller, lighter and more sophisticated than ever before – yet
underground photography is still considered to be one of the hardest subjects
to master.

In 1866, Charles Waldack, a Belgian living in the US, was already familiar
with the problems when he wrote: ‘You will agree with me that photographing
in a cave is photographing under the worst conditions.’

The ability to photograph in the utter darkness found only below ground
depended totally upon the development of portable forms of artificial light.
Louis Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot announced their inventions of photography
in 1839, but for many years the processes were insensitive; exposure times
took minutes rather than seconds. The emulsions coating glass slides were
sensitive only to the blue ‘actinic’ part of the spectrum, but light sources
such as oil lamps and limelight (brilliant light produced by heating a cylinder
of unslaked lime) were deficient in this area. Although Felix Nadar, the
French portrait photographer, succeeded in photographing the Paris catacombs
between 1861 and 1862 using an arc light, it was magnesium that brought
the freedom from sunlight that photographers required.

In 1808, Humphrey Davy first isolated magnesium, but a commercial process
did not emerge until the early 1860s. Robert Bunsen of Heidelberg (he of
the burner), working with Henry Roscoe of Owen’s College in Manchester (later
to become UMIST), investigated the photochemical properties of the metal
and reported them to the Royal Society. The paper stimulated Edward Sonstadt
of Leicester to experiment further, and by 1864 he had produced large lumps
of magnesium; one Edinburgh professor was so impressed he chortled: ‘Bottled
sunshine! – portable daylight!’

Although Sonstadt stood to make a great deal of money from his patents,
publicity was required. Magnesium was expensive to produce. Sold in the
form of wire, it cost Pounds sterling 6 a pound in England, or 2s 6d (12.5p)
a foot. A photographer might need several feet to expose one photographic
plate. To illustrate the power of magnesium, and perhaps aid sales, the
Manchester Magnesium Company supplied Alfred Brothers, a professional photographer
in Manchester, with a quantity of the metal. He used it to photograph one
of the Blue John caverns in Derbyshire on 27 January 1865. This picture,
although little known, was the first successful use of magnesium underground.

The Astronomer Royal of Scotland, Charles Piazzi Smyth, accompanied
an expedition to Egypt at this time. He hoped to prove that the pyramids
were built using a measurement similar to the inch as part of his campaign
against the French metre. By photographing the King’s Coffer at Giza, deep
within the Great Pyramid, he would be able to bring back proof of his measurements.
His pictures, while they did not support his theories, did astound his audiences.
The ensuing publicity was enough to push magnesium into the forefrontof
photography using artificial light, and a new industrybegan to develop.

Magnesium’s advantage lay with its portability and its richness in actinic
light. Its disadvantages were the clouds of smoke that arose whenever it
was burned, and the length of time the exposure took. Fumes would intrude
upon the scene while it was photographed. A second picture in a catacomb,
cave or mine was rare: the photographer had to make a single attempt, then
leave for 24 hours while the magnesium oxide ash settled. It is not surprising
that attempts were soon made to speed up the process, and contain the fumes.
But it was many years before they succeeded.

At Giza, Piazzi Smyth attempted as part of his work ‘the explosion of
1 oz of magnesium mixed with a small powderhorn . . . of gunpowder’. The
results were poor, with the picture showing flying sparks, but Smyth had
produced the first crude flashpowder. Other photographers tried diluting
magnesium powder with sand before pouring the mixture through the flame
of a soldering lamp, but in general there were few experiments with magnesium.
The expense was enough to deter most people. Photographers who needed artificial
light opted for simple magnesium wire or ribbon.

Charles Waldack was one of the pioneer photographers. He lived in Cincinnati,
Ohio. In 1866, the area was suffering the aftermath of the civil war, which
had ended in 1864. The celebrated Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, a tourist attraction,
desperately needed publicity. Waldack was asked to take some pictures for
sale as stereo cards. He made two expeditions to Mammoth Cave, on one occasion
spending35 hours underground, and succeeded spectacularly. Theeditor of
the Philadelphia Photographer was overcomewhen he saw the photographs:

‘These pictures now lie before us, and are the most wonderful ones we
have ever seen. We can scarcely remove our eyes from the instrument, or
lay them down to write, for perfect wonder. Oh! is not photography a great
power? What else could creep into the bowels of the earth, and bring forth
such pictures therefrom, as these? It hardly seems possible.’

Waldack reaped his rewards when he saw sales of his stereo cards soar.
The public was fascinated by the underground world without sun that he brought
before it but, perhaps not surprisingly, cave photography did not become
a popular pastime. Problems remained great, not only due to the magnesium
fumes. The photographic process in use depended on collodion, a sticky compound
of guncotton dissolved in ether. This coated a glass plate, and carried
the light-sensitive chemicals. Unfortunately, the ether in the collodion
quickly evaporated, leaving the compound impermeable. The photographer therefore
had to coat, sensitise, expose and develop the plate within a few minutes.
Waldack had to carry all his processing chemicals down the caves as well
as his camera and tripod; he warmed his plates over fires made by burning
bourbon in the magnesium reflectors, washing the developed negatives in
pools of water within the cave.

The 1880s saw further progress in the evolution of artificial lighting.
Photographers found that they could easily produce a flash by blowing magnesium
powder into the flame of an alcohol lamp, and scores of powder burners,
or ‘puff lamps’, came onto the market. Some of these were huge triple-headed
constructions that injected petrol into the air supply to aid burning. Then,
in 1887, Johannes Gaedicke and Adolf Miethe announced their invention of
flashpowder: magnesium powder mixed with an oxidising agent, potassium chlorate.
Photographic journals thought that with the short-duration flash, there
was, at last, a method for taking sharp pictures of moving objects. They
were right. The term blitzlicht, or flashlight, had arrived.

Since Waldack’s time people had known that light had to be kept well
away from the camera for cave photography, not only to minimise the effects
of the fumes, but also to prevent the appearance of ‘fog’. Cave air is very
humid, and it reflects light too near the lens back onto the sensitive emulsion,
creating a misty effect and ruining the picture. (Much the same result occurs
when you drive in fog with your car headlamps on main beam.) To this day,
keeping the flash away from the camera remains one of the most basic tenets
of cave photography.

Among the first to use flashpowder underground was a German, Max Muller,
in 1888. To obtain clear pictures, Muller wished to fire his flashpowder
at the end of a pole, keeping both fumes and the light away from his lens.
He devised a means of blowing fungal lycopodium spores through a candle
flame. These glowed, and were directed down a tube to ignite a twist of
guncotton, on which the flashpowder had been poured, causing a flash (see
Diagram). The effectiveness of this new light was immediately apparent:
Muller’s photographs of the Hermannshohle in Germany were superb. The cave
guide was depicted holding a lantern aloft, without a trace of blurring
in the picture. This was a crucial advance. Previously, photographs of people
taken underground were likely to be blurred due to the long exposure times.

Flashpowder made the production of cave photographs far easier than
it had ever been. With increasing tourism and a growing market for photographs,
photographers began to specialise in underground pictures, and when the
scientific exploration of caves began towards the end of the 19th century,
photographers were there to record the discoveries that were made.

The lure of the unknown drew the attention of the French to the Causses,
a region of barren limestone where rivers sank beneath the earth and pits
dropped suddenly from the surface of the plateau. Edouard Martel was the
driving force in the exploration of the area during the late 1880s and 1890s.
Martel was concerned that he might not be able to persuade the general public
that lakes, cascades and many kilometres of passage were contained in the
subterranean world he had discovered. Photography provided the proof.

The caverns of the Causses were very different from those elsewhere
in the world. Explorers had to follow rivers by boat, and use rope ladders
to descend the many drops. They needed new techniques of photography to
deal with these arduous conditions and to record the large chambers they
discovered. Feeling that flashpowder ‘must be absolutely banned from caving
expeditions’ as it might explode and dislodge loose rocks, cave photographers
designed new powder lamps. One of these, the Regnard lamp, used kitchen
bellows to blow magnesium through a flame. The searing flash that resulted
was some 2 metres in height.

Another ingenious technique was to make a special candle from magnesium
powder, barium nitrate, sulphur and beef fat. The fat was melted and mixed
with the dry powders, then poured into zinc pots. When lit, the candle emitted
20 000 candlepower (about 20 000 candelas) of light.

Mines received less attention than caves. The earliest coal mining picture
was taken in the Bradford Colliery near Walsall, England, in 1865, but it
was not until 1884 that the first serious attempts to depict a miner’s life
were made. George Bretz received a commission to take pictures in the Kohinoor
Colliery at Shenandoah, Virginia, for the New Orleans Exposition in that
year. He used five arc lights, powered by a dynamo and a compressed-air
engine. Later workers, both in America and Britain, favoured the use of
magnesium, either as ribbon or powder. It is surprising that no explosions
caused by the naked light sources were recorded. Such forms of artificial
light would not now be permitted.

As Herbert Hughes, a proponent of coal-mine photography, wrote in 1893:
‘the subject was hedged round with difficulties . . . One really flared
off as much magnesium as possible, and if the result happened to be as good
it was good, and that was practically the gist of the whole subject . .
. (I do) not think underground photography (will) ever become popular.’

Now, nearly 100 years later, speleology and mine exploration are more
popular, and some photographers specialise in depicting the underground
world. While the work done today might have surprised Herbert Hughes, I
suspect that many modern cave photographers would be even more astonished
at the determination, inventiveness and quality of results produced by the
early pioneers in this hardest of photographic challenges.

Chris Howes is the author of To Photograph Darkness: The History of
Underground and Flash Photography, published by Alan Sutton, pp 325, Pounds
sterling 25. He edits the cavers’ magazine Descent and teaches biology.