Petrified


  • Photographer
    Nenad Saljic
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Date of Photograph
    2012-2017

This is a seven-year project about our perception, conducted in Croatian caves.

Story

Petrified

A few million years ago our distant forebears took shelter in the caves. Many millennia afterwards, caves were their studios and galleries, places where the first artists created, inspired by their sheer depth and darkness.

Today, we visit caves for very different reasons, but we have the opportunity to look at similar scenes. The interplay of light and shadow, where daylight and the dark of the depths clash, turns the cave entrances into movie projectors and the rock walls into theatres. Perhaps these things were observed in prehistoric times, making the caves the first home cinemas.

Looking from the caves towards the sky raises some questions: Is our perception essentially different from that of our ancestors? How does our imagination and how does our fear of the unknown differ from theirs? Are we just the shadows in passing, as in Plato’s underground spectacle?

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