In classic tales, holes are both a blessing and a trap. They serve as a hiding place, but they are also perfect catwalks to fall, to get lost, to slide into another dimension. Although, in reality, holes are the name we give to the unknown. What we cannot see.
In its Latin etymology, hole comes from the word needle and initially meant ‘needle perforation’. What happens with them, with holes, is that it is easy to underestimate their size, to forget that every hole was, at its birth, little more than the head of a pin, pure potentiality, something almost imperceptible that ended up widening, becoming a slit, in a crack. Or, perhaps, in an immense and abyssal cavity.
Tens of thousands of years ago, the hole in question, the Great Blue Hole, located 100 kilometers off the coast of Belize, was dry land. But with the rise in sea level, after the end of the ice ages, it was submerged, and that cave that probably would have originally been a needle hole became a blue sinkhole.
Circular in shape, this seemingly infinite hole – it is more than 300 meters wide and 125 meters deep – is located in the center of an atoll, the Lighthouse Reef, a turquoise coral island that frames it, and is part of the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Although many today insist on diving its depths, no one has been able to know what actually guards the Great Blue Hole. One of the first to get there was the French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau who, aboard the now legendary Calypso, made a dive in 1960. Determined, he stated that he wanted to trace its depths, but, wise as he was, he returned to the surface only having found some stalactites that confirmed the origin of this vertical cave. He had data, measurements. But of the origin of the mystery, no trace.
That you have to be careful with the holes, the classic stories warned us, as we said at the beginning. Although the one who did it most insistently was Nietzsche, who turned the hole into an abyss and firmly warned us that whoever looks too much into the abyss allows the abyss to look back at him. And, therefore, this photographer, aware of the danger, wanted to take this photograph from far away, from the sky. It were not the case that Nietzsche was right. Although thinking carefully, it is from the distance that the holes stop being abysses and become beauty, wonder. To be the door to that other reality that always escapes us, but to which we want to think that we are always, even if slowly, approaching.
