Lovci teme

The first underground photograph was made by the French man Louis Boutan back in 1893 on a plate. His camera weighed at least 200 kilos. It was locked in a copper barrel. The plates were made especially for him by the Lumiere brothers. It took another four decades, before the German Hans Haas constructed the first closed housing system in 1937, and made a series of good underwater photographs in the Adriatic Sea. The same summer, a small group of Slovene natural science students who called themselves Račani, dived beneath the sea without a helmet. They replaced it with an ingenious home-made diving gear. They took their first underwater photographs with their simple home-made "bell". With this, Slovenes equalled the achievements of the Germans and became the first underwater photographers. Not only that, we became the pioneers of exploratory and scientific underwater photography, as the first scientifically analysed and catalogued collection of plant and animal photographs made the very same year proves. These pioneers were Ivan Kuščer, Dušan Kuščer, Marko Zalokar and Drago Leskovšek.

Račani wrote in their diary: Each of us dived into the bay at Rača that day. The blueness of the sea, the fish, algae and the sea urchins were exciting enough. It is a special feeling to hover in the "blue". You're by yourself, hanging by a thick rope and surrounded by a blue emptiness. You lose your sense of distance, the bottom is infinitely deep. That was our dream. Freed from the laws of gravity, I floated in a three-dimensional space. Thanks to my new "lungs", I could make carefree moves, levitated in emptiness, ascended and descended... I vaguely felt that I was cheating nature. But it seemed impossible to be punished for such a beautiful sin. This spot under the Velebit range was our home for seven summers. Here we made our first steps into the wonderful, undersea world. Rača was the site of numerous fantastic experiences, our promised land, where we forgot all the perks of city life. It was a school where we learned about nature and ourselves. We wish everyone to have such great times as we had here.

What drove those young men, who had just recently come of age, to set out in 1937 on foot to the coast, and became part of the history of the undersea studies and also pioneers of exploratory underwater photography? A hidden story about human passion and an unending yearning to discover the unknown – a story about an astonishing beauty and the aesthetics of the mysterious...