Arts review: The Heart of the Great Alone

Published on Monday 12 October 2009 18:56

THE HEART OF THE GREAT ALONE: SCOTT, SHACKLETON & ANTARCTIC PHOTOGRAPHY **** QUEEN'S GALLERY, EDINBURGH

ON 1 NOVEMBER, 1911, Robert Falcon Scott set out from his ship, the Terra Nova, moored at the edge of the ice in the Ross Sea, to lead an exploration party consisting of himself and four companions, dragging sledges across Antarctica to the South Pole. They should have been the first to reach the Pole, but when they got there on 17 January 1912, they found the Norwegian flag already flying. Roald Amundsen and his party, with their dog teams, had got there first.

What had been an expedition to raise the Union Flag at the Pole – after all, at the time it flew over a large proportion of the world already – had become a race, and the Norwegian had beaten them. Deeply disappointed, they set off on the return journey.

The conditions are the most extreme on Earth, but they seem to have been dressed in little more than woolly hats and jumpers. One man died from the extreme conditions. Then, in a heroic act of self-sacrifice, another member of the team, Captain Lawrence Oates, frostbitten and ill, walked out into a blizzard from the tent at their final camp. His famous farewell is recorded in Scott's diary: "I am just going outside and may be some time." The last three survivors, including Scott, died in their tent two days later. They were only 11 miles from stores that would have seen them back to safety.

Scott's ill-fated expedition became an archetype of tragic heroism. Two years later, Ernest Shackleton sailed to the Antarctic on his ship, Endurance, to attempt to cross the frozen continent from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea. Before they could even begin, however, the Endurance was crushed by the ice and sank on 21 November 1915. There was no hope of rescue and so Shackleton took his crew 400 miles, drifting on sea ice and by boat, to Elephant Island. Then with five men, leaving 22 behind, he sailed in a 23-foot open boat, the James Caird (a Dundee name reflecting the city's whaling history), 800 miles across the open ocean to South Georgia to get help. In the last part of his journey, he had to cross the snow-covered mountains of the interior of the island without maps or equipment. In the end, thanks to Shackleton's personal courage and leadership, all his men got home safely, though sadly several were to die soon after in the trenches of the First World War. It was another story of heroic failure.

All this took place less than a century ago. Now tourists visit the Antarctic. Their ships cruise among the icebergs, but at that time the vast frozen continent was quite unknown. Only a handful of explorers had reached the edge of the ice; few had ventured beyond it, and none had photographed it adequately.

The first photographer to go there, Hubert Ponting, travelled with Scott in 1911. Shackleton also took a photographer, Frank Hurley. King George V took a great interest in these expeditions and the Royal Library has a fine collection of photographs presented to the king by the photographers. These marvellous and often dramatic pictures are the subject of the latest exhibition in the Queen's Gallery at Holyrood, The Heart of the Great Alone.

The pictures taken by Ponting and Hurley were not the first photographs of the Antarctic. On their previous expeditions, both Scott on the Discovery and Shackleton on the Nimrod had had cameras, as had members of other contemporary expeditions, but the results only made the need for a professional more apparent. Ponting and Hurley were professionals and this tells, both in the images that they capture and in the quality of the prints they made from them.

They needed to be professional too. It was not easy working in a deep freeze, and there were other hazards. The ice floes were always treacherous – on one occasion, perched on a floe, Ponting had to retreat hurriedly from a concerted attack by killer whales. Some of Hurley's most remarkable pictures are of the Endurance stuck in the ice. He spent three continuous days out on the ice in order to capture the ship's final moments.

Before she sank he had dived down into the flooded ship to rescue cans of film. "It was mighty cold work groping about in the mushy ice in the semi-darkness of the ship's bowels," he wrote with classic understatement. In the journey that followed he had to abandon his plate camera and most of his plates. Nevertheless, pictures were so valuable that the surviving plates were carried back on the James Caird, taking the place of some survival stores on an overloaded boat.

The value put on them reflects the fact that appreciation of the work of a professional photographer was not simply aesthetic, however wonderful the results. Then, as now, such expeditions depended on fundraising and when he decided to take Ponting, Scott was clear that good pictures would be an invaluable aid in generating support for new ventures. For Shackleton, advance payment on the rights to the pictures was part of his funding.

It is a tribute to Scott's judgement that the pictures taken by the first photographer to visit Antarctica should be still among the most beautiful. Ponting recorded wildlife, the grizzled explorers, their dogs and horses. (Manchurian ponies were thought fitted to the conditions, but didn't last long. Nor did petrol-engined tractors.) Another of Ponting's tasks was to train others to use a camera, so the ill-fated polar team took a camera with them. There is a poignant picture of them gathered despondently around Amundsen's flag at the Pole.

But it is the landscapes that make the show. The carbon printing process that Ponting used is not always simply black-and-white, and some of his prints have a bluish or a greenish tint that adds to the mysterious beauty of his remarkable images. In Grotto in an Iceberg, for instance, the green tint of the print seems to come from the walls of a cave of ice that, beneath a screen of icicles, frames the Terra Nova, tiny in the distance. As in this picture, elsewhere Ponting is brilliant in the way he conveys the scale of the landscape. In The Ramparts of Mount Erebus, a figure pushes a sledge beneath a mighty cliff of ice. Towering above it, the volcano, Mt Erebus, dwarfs the ice cliff in turn.

In another one of the prints here, Cirrus Clouds over the Barne Glacier, Ponting has also developed the effect of implicit colour and used an orange-tinted paper to convey the quality of the light in the sky.

It is pictures like this of the southern midnight sun that are most beautiful. In them you can see the beauty that is possible with photography, a beauty that is also uniquely its own.

In the exhibition Ponting has the advantage as his prints are large and of superb quality. Hurley's are all smaller. You only appreciate their quality when you put Ponting's out of your mind.

As with Ponting, Hurley's landscapes are the most striking. Ice-flowers, Spring 1915 is superb, for instance, as are his photographs of the Endurance in the ice as it gradually overwhelmed her. These pictures are the few survivors, however – Hurley had to abandon 400 of his plates.

Thereafter, on the journey to safety, without his plate camera he used a pocket camera. As he documents the extraordinary events that followed – camps along the way, the bivouac on Elephant Island, launching the James Caird, Shackleton's departure and the first sighting of the ship that Shackleton brought to the rescue more than four months later – the pictures gain authenticity from the grainy, casual quality of the image.

&#149 Until 11 April