The Romance of (Reused) Underground Lairs
These awesome and eerie subways, mines, hotels and data centers glow with subterranean allure
What is the deeper meaning of underground lairs? Why do we find them fascinating — even, in some shadowy way, romantic? Perhaps it’s some atavistic notion of the safety of the burrow. Or maybe it’s simply our curiosity about what goes on in places that are hidden away from sight.
From the Bat Cave to the basement office where Mulder and Scully keep the X-Files, underground retreats have featured prominently in fiction. Meanwhile, Mexico’s crime kingpin El Chapo showed that a spacious escape tunnel — one featuring a motorcycle running on tracks — could be handy in real life.
“Underground lairs are an integral part of pop culture fantasy and real-life current events — but whether they’re fake or real, they’re always cloaked in intrigue. And frankly, they’re cool as hell,” noted Gizmodo in a post featuring some of actual subterranean settings that would be fit for a super-villain.
The world below the real world is, of course, also a place where we find transportation and, as Vanity Fair noted in 2013, more and more housing. Our interest in and delight with underground sites is strong, whatever the reason, which may explain why we have seen so many photo series featuring subterranean locations of one kind and another over the past year. Here we gather a number of them.
1. Fascinating Subway Tunnels Around the World
When German photographer Timo Stammberger was a kid, his grandfather often took him on trips to a nearby train station, which happened to be adjacent to a freight train yard, and, as Creative Boom noted, he’s been a “track romantic” ever since. In 2003, he started to explore and photograph the underground track landscapes of cities he lived in, from Barcelona and Berlin to Frankfurt and New York.
About his series Underground Landscapes, Stammberger says, “Rarely do passengers get to see the real beauty of subway tunnels as they travel on their journey through the underground of cities. This quiet world lies below the surface of our daily life.”
2. Scenes From the Underground
“Caves and tunnels have always been part of human life,” noted The Atlantic recently. “We’ve grown more adept at shaping these underground shelters and passages over the millennia, and today we dig for hundreds of reasons. We excavate to find both literal and cultural treasures, digging mines and unearthing archaeological discoveries.”
“As the planet’s surface becomes ever more crowded and national borders are closed,” continues The Atlantic, “tunnels provide pathways for our vehicles and for smugglers of every kind.”
The Atlantic featured subterranean images from a number of wire photographers, including Ueslei Marcelino of Reuters, who photographed the Cuncas II tunnel in Brazil.
3. The New Lives of Decommissioned Swiss Army Bunkers
The Atlantic’s attention once again turned downward when it featured Reuters photographer Arnd Wiegmann’s images showing decommissioned Swiss military bunkers that are being recycled in astonishingly ways.
The bunkers, some dating back to World War II, have been sold off. They now house everything from cheese aging warehouses to mushroom farms, hotels, and modern data centers.
4. The History Buried Within Berlin’s U-Bahn
One of the best places to sense the history of Berlin is within the city’s underground subway, known as the U-Bahn, noted Creative Boom last year in a feature about Danish photographer Patrick Kauffmann’s series documenting the subway’s remarkable and remarkably varied stations.
“No two of the 173 stations are alike” said Creative Boom, “because the network has continued to develop and expand over the past 100 years, with the most recent station opening in 2009.”
“In the U-Bahn,” explains Kauffmann, “you can experience a sway of different time eras and styles ranging from Art Nouveau and Art Deco over German Jugenstile and Bauhaus to the Futurism of the 1970s.”
5. Tokyo Compression
Photographer Michael Wolf is known for his large-format architectural photos of Chicago and Hong Kong, where he has been living for many years. But last year, LensCulture featured his series Tokyo Compression which focuses on Tokyo’s claustrophobic underground subway system.
Wolf brings us very close to the commuters who cram into close, moist contact with each other while getting to their destinations, many spending two or more hours squeezed into hellish submission.
“In Wolf’s pictures,” noted the website, “we look into countless human faces, all trying to sustain this evident madness in their own way.”
6. The Search for Gold In Siberia
The Kupol gold mine is one of the most isolated mines in the world, situated in a remote area of Eastern Siberia in the Russian district of Chukotka, noted the Washington Post last year.
The mine is accessible only by plane and is staffed by an international group of workers hailing from countries including Russia, Ukraine, Canada, Germany, Brazil and Hungary. Below the frozen surface lies what photographer Elena Chernyshova found to be an ultra-modern facility that included warm living quarters, TV lounges, a gym and even a church.
7. The James Bond Villain Data Center
This story goes back a few years, but the pictures were so memorable we couldn’t help but resurrect it for this post. In 2011, Wired featured photographer Christoph Morlinghaus’ images of the Wikileaks Data Center and other caverns.
The Wikileaks Data Center, built into a former military bunker and nuclear shelter under the streets of Stockholm, is nicknamed the James Bond Villain Data Center because it looks like a set from a 007 film,. The bunker is nuke-proof. Go here to read an interview with the photographer published at the time.
Originally published by American Photography AI-AP. David Schonauer is editor of Pro Photo Daily, AI-AP Profiles and Motion Arts Pro. Follow him on Twitter. Jeffrey Roberts is publisher of Pro Photo Daily and AI-AP. Follow Jeffrey onTwitter. Follow Pro Photo Daily on Facebook.
