Two Caves, Both Curated
One cave is a show, the other a closely guarded wilderness. In both, there is nothing to see until someone lights it.
How do we experience nature when no photograph stands between us and it? To find out, I chose two karst caves that could not be more different. In the tourist cave of Postojna I went in, by arrangement with the management, with various groups of visitors and watched how they responded.1 Into the strictly protected Križna Cave I went for a newspaper feature.2
Postojna is curated like a gallery. A little train carries you in, and the light rises slowly, because too much detail at once would disturb visitors. The lamps are hidden in crevices and behind stalactites, so that the light seems to belong to the cave, which is the most unnatural thing of all. Paths and railings do not enable the experience; they mediate it. On one ride I sat with an Indian family who told me it was much better than Jurassic Park, which they had visited the month before.
The untouched cave
Križna is the opposite. Visitors put on caving gear and paddle, at most four at a time with a guide, across underground lakes held back by flowstone barriers that grow by a tenth of a millimetre a year or less.3 Our guide decided where each of us could step. It feels purer, more direct. It is not. For the feature, the photographer Jaka Adamič and I carried in rucksacks of equipment and powerful floodlights. A single photograph took half an hour or an hour of long exposures, while I stood in a rushing stream holding a lamp and he directed the beams like a conductor. The cave does not look like those pictures.
Lights out
In Postojna, at one point, the guide switches off the lights and announces that this is what the cave really looks like. In Križna the group is asked to turn off their head lamps. Without light, neither place is what it is. Postojna’s depiction lies in its dramaturgy of shapes and little stories, Križna’s in its aura of untouchedness. Both must be curated before we can experience them at all; otherwise they are empty and mute. We do not only turn nature into pictures. Even standing inside it, we apply the picture to nature.
Read the full section in the dissertation