When the Romanian Cultural Institute offered British photographer Richard Seymour a grant to photograph the country’s capital, Bucharest, he first turned his lens to the countryside, believing it to be an important step to understanding the character of the city itself.
In the midst of his research, Seymour dove 367 feet underground to uncover Salina Turda, a salt mine that was repurposed into a subterranean theme park in the 1990s.
Featuring everything from a bowling alley, an underground rowing lake and a Ferris Wheel to a mini golf course and ping pong courts, the cathedral-like space is so impressive in scale that its experience can only be hinted at with words and images.
“The sounds of the bowling, shouts and laughter echo throughout the whole space. The place is very dark, but for a subterranean space, the air quality is really quite good, it feels quite fresh inside,” says Seymour.
Seymour’s series of images renders the majesty of millennium-old matter framing the organic setting for an unexpected tourist attraction. “Photographing this space was a challenge due to its sheer scale,” he explains. “Humans are put into perspective, and the difference between nature and manmade features is blurred.”
After feeding the economies of 13th-century Hungarian kings and Habsburg emperors — for whom salt was more valuable than gold — the salt mine served as a cheese storage center and then a bomb shelter during World War II.
Nowadays, the underground and salt-infused environmental conditions of Salina Turda even allow it to house a healing center for people with lung conditions.
Prints of Richard Seymour’s Salina Turda series are available for purchase directly from the artist.
For more striking photographs, check out Laurent Kronental’s photographs of Postmodern Paris, Zsolt Hlinka’s perfectly symmetrical Budapest portraits or Oliver Astrologo’s photo essay of the brutalist Casa Sperimentale in Italy.
