Subterranea by Sally Gall

‘Subterranea’ hovers between the known and unknown, Gall travels to the edge of darkness to create imagery that captures architecture of the earth, often containing otherworldly feeling. Over the course of three years Gall traveled to caves and lava tubes with her 8×10 film camera. The photographs were made in Thailand, California, and in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and Belize as well as the ancient aqueducts of France and Italy. Within this hidden landscape and with very little natural lighting, she recorded the vast landscapes, caverns, canyons and underground rivers that live beneath the earth’s surface. Speleologists call the light in which Gall photographs the twilight zone, a place where inner meets outer, a place where opposites converge. The photographs of ‘Subterannea’ not only evoke a feeling of mystery and upend one’s feeling of the known, but they recall a sense of life and death. They exist somehow closer to the place where all humans eventually come to rest, the ground itself. One would half expect Charon the ferryman to the underworld to paddle out from the darkness. Conversely the silence and utter exactness to Gall’s photographs is almost overwhelming at times as you turn from page to page. Each photograph is paired with a title such as ‘Shift’ or ‘Cathedral’ referencing the structures and architecture of the landscape depicted. Black and white seems fitting for these spaces not for its nostalgia, but for it ability to render shadow and detail, even in the deepest black or brightest highlight.Gall explains that at first she was quite frightened of these spaces while discovering her first cave on a jungle hike in Veracruz, Mexico. Now she says “instead of being afraid of the dark, I now embrace it.” I have found illumination in a place of foreboding – where I had not expected it and where most people wouldn’t look for it. I no longer just seek the sun, nor rush through the night toward the day. Darkness has a radiancy and a range – velvety, enveloping, creepy, comforting, disabling, meditative, palpable.” Galls book begins with a forward by poet Mark Strand, exploring the emotion of grandeur and the power of silence. The book concludes with an essay by writer Nan Richardson, highlighting the reference these places Gall photographs to the Mayan people and other cultures. ‘Subterannea’ draws its viewers deeper and deeper into the darkness, into a world often forgotten.
By Emily Vallee