“There was a cave near the house where I grew up. As teenagers wewent there to smoke and drink. It was private, protected, and wild.

Inside the cave there were names and dates everywhere on thewalls–some 100 years old. My older brother’s friends’ names werethere. Daryll Walker found his father’s name in there–dated 1965; fouryears before Daryll was born. We scratched our names on the wall too.

The inside of a cave feels like the subconscious. Darkness andsilence diminish the senses; fear and fascination are intensified.There is no horizon, sometimes not even a ground to speak of. A uniqueawareness of the body and the self emerges. Cave spaces are often huge,anonymous and primordially private. Something rooted in evolutionarymemory triggers an urge to make marks, signify; to commemorateexistence.

The cave I explored as a teen, and all the caves I photographed havebeen mined for saltpetre, found in the nitrate-saturated earth. Miningwas widespread during the Civil War when demand was high for saltpetre,the main ingredient of gunpowder. During this period, caves becamesites of local lore and fascination and people began exploring themextensively. There has remained a steady local interest in caveexploration, creating an expansive record of markings, signatures,drawings, and messages. Some caves have been so heavily visited, themarkings are several layers deep. In one of my photographs, scratchedtally-marks made by slaves counting bags of saltpetre they hauled outof the cave in 1865 lies beneath smoke written signatures from the1930′s, and is overlaid by day-glo orange spray paint proclaiming,”Star from MySpace.com Rocks.”

The 160 years of graffiti on the walls of these caves in Tennesseeand Alabama are commemorations of the ritual of exploration. When thework on these cave walls is compared to Pleistocene era art making,like that in the caves of Lascaux, one can imagine the course of humanevolution–from frank representations of nature, to layered, expressivegestures that reflect a culture fascinated with personal identity.

I photographed these caves from the vantage point of an artist,explorer, evolutionist, and native son. These catacombs elicit andarchive the drawn voices of wild adolescents, homegrown explorers,criminals, scientists, and slaves. Their names, messages, and drawingstogether with the entropic, bodily forms of the cave walls tell acomplicated story where human culture and the changing earth intertwine.”

Johnny

Registry

OKeyhole Respire

Ricky Simmons

Renegade Room

Lot’s Way

Mark’s Passage

Wall Pendant

Tally Marks

Johnny’s my favorite. You?

See more of Whetstone’s always fabulous work, here.