By Jenna Remley
It’s hard to take photos in a cave.
I watched another woman on the tour of Hidden River Cave try, regardless. She had an iPhone - one newer and nicer than my own, which is not surprising - and she cycled through every single mode the camera had to see if any of them could sufficiently capture the underground ravine in front of us.
Over the hour-long tour other people took photos as well - flash photos of their family members where the entire background was washed out, or photos aimed at the sections of rock sparsely illuminated by the spotlights that dotted the paved path.
I took a few photos myself - I had the same urge as everyone else to document the experience. But photography is the recording of light, and there just isn’t much light inside a cave.
I was intrigued by this futile urge that we all had to capture lasting proof of this experience, instead of simply enjoying it in the moment. Was it just that we’d all had our brains poisoned by Instagram and couldn’t fully appreciate a trip if it wasn’t posted with a filter and geotag? I knew within the first ten minutes of being in the cave that I wouldn’t be able to take any good pictures of the things around me, since the camera on my iPhone 7 is so much less powerful than my own eyes. But periodically we would come across some new cool feature of the cave, and I’d still try again to somehow get a digital record of it.
On my way back from the cave tour, I stopped at the Kentucky Museum in Bowling Green, which had an exhibit on Mammoth Cave. Specifically, it focused on how humans sought to understand the cave through both scientific and artistic means. It included a variety of artistic depictions of the cave's interiors from historical excursions, long before everyone had access to a camera. The paintings and drawings on display attempted to convey the darkness, the mystery, the exploration, and the awe of being in these underground passages. One explanatory plaque read, “Both tourists and scientists share a common motivation: curiosity. [...] Both are motivated by a sense of wonder and thrill of discovery.”
I think people have always wanted to capture the moments when they are doing something cool, in order to show others and remember it themselves in the future. To go somewhere, and to carry that place within you once you leave. To prove to others and to yourself that you were truly there. To see something remarkable and want to hold on to it before it slips through your fingers. There are plenty of entirely reasonable motivations for wanting to take photos when you go somewhere or do something special. We have no option but to live in the moment, and when the present moment is awesome, we want to preserve that. Nowadays, more people just have the technology to do so a lot more easily.
There are countless photos of the Eiffel Tower in existence - I could pull up millions of them through any online search engine. Yet I still took a photo of it when I visited Paris. It wasn’t about the image itself, which was taken on an even worse phone camera and wasn’t particularly well-framed. It was about the confluence of that landmark and me, a way of proving that I’d traveled to that city and seen that notable object. My own wonder, documented for the future.
George Watsky has a lyric that goes I’ve seen a person go to shows and raise a lighter app / But if you’re at my concert please don’t ever try that crap. It’s from a song that I quite enjoy, and one he performed when I saw his show in San Francisco last month. Amusingly, some people held up actual lighters during the song. I wondered how many of them were actually smokers, and how many brought the lighters for the express purpose of following the song’s instructions.
I mean, I get it. There’s something that feels intrinsically more authentic about using actual fire instead of a phone flashlight. Just like there’s something more romantic about a dramatic sketch of an underground lake instead of a washed-out photo. But the urge is the same - it’s just the technology that has changed. Whether you’re holding up a flame or an LCD screen, the sentiment you’re trying to convey is still I’m here, and I see you, and you see me, and isn’t this moment so wonderful?
My photos of Hidden River Cave don’t do it justice, and I’m not a skilled painter, so I’ll just have to capture the memory in words:
Over Memorial Day weekend, I went to a cave. It was my first time in Kentucky. The town of Horse Cave, KY has a population of around 2,000, and right behind Main Street, the mouth of a cavern yawns open. The tour guide would occasionally point his flashlight up at the ceiling and say, “So-and-so’s house is right up there. The cafe is above the cave here. There are train tracks over this chamber - if you feel rumbling, it’s probably a train, and not the cave collapsing.”
Hidden River Cave does have a stream running through it, and the whole interior floods occasionally, which prevents the creation of large stalagmites or stalactites. The cave contains the longest underground suspension bridge in the world, and there’s something magical about walking across a hanging platform in a dim underground passage, bouncing slightly as the bridge pushes back against your footfalls. It does feel a little like you’re the hero of an adventure story, even though you’re on a guided tour with two dozen other people.
The final chamber is made of striations of red and gold and brown rock, aptly named Sunset Dome. The open space echoes every voice, and the tour guide informed us that the interior volume of the dome, by his calculations, was equivalent to over 30 Dollar General stores.
When I come across my photos of the Eiffel Tower taken in March 2016, I don’t admire them as particularly good representations of one of the most well-known landmarks in the world. But seeing them helps me recall what it was like to traipse across Europe on spring break, buying cheap chocolate and wine to share with my friends as we sat along the Seine. The photo acts as a time capsule for an experience I don't ever want to forget.
So hopefully when I someday scroll past my poorly-lit, inadequate photos of Hidden River Cave, they'll trigger my memories of how being in the cave really looked and sounded and felt. There’s no way to perfectly recreate that moment from the past. Instead, I’ll have to rely on dim photos, insufficient words, and my own fallible memory to carry this experience into the future.
If you're curious:
Hidden River Cave
The Art and Science of Mammoth Cave exhibit
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