explosions on ice

photograph courtesy of Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge.

scott's hut

Visiting the exhibition on Scott's hut (and after seeing the recent documentary in the UK on how it had been preserved at Cape Evans) I was looking forward to seeing it's recreation in Sydney at the National Maritime Museum. Unfortunately, it hasn't really been recreated; all there is, is a floor map not unlike the stage set for Lars von Trier's Dogville and Manderlay, mapping on the floor the relative positions of where the crew would have slept etc.

the real Scott's hut at Cape Evans, Antarctica

In the gift shop, things got worse, with poor old Robert Falcon's fate reduced to a snowstorm paperweight. Not sure whether it's hilarious or in bad taste..

the photographs of frank hurley

a radiant turret lit by the midsummer midnight sun
Made during the first Australasian Antarctic expedition, 1911-14

After seeing the film made by Herbert Ponting recently, I started looking a bit more into the other major figure to document the great early Antarctic expeditions, namely the Australian Frank Hurley. Hurley accompanied Shackleton on the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-17 on the Endurance, where he worked as expedition photographer, but he also had the same role on other voyages, such as the first Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-14.

I think I find Hurley's work more interesting because it seems more varied and often, more intimate, showing details on a human scale. There are of course many wonderful and breathtakingly beautiful images of ice landscapes by Hurley that display grandeur and are intended to create a sense of awe in the viewer, such as in the image above, but his pictures often also seem to contain details that pleasingly undermine this distance from the subject, or which manage to convey some of the physicality of place that can be difficult in the stilled form of the photograph.

Out in the blizzard at Cape Denison adjacent to winter quarters, 1913, Carbon print

For example, the famous image of two men hunched against the wind, ice axes in hand as they struggle to move in the midst of a blizzard (above) is well known, and has almost become emblematic of the difficulty of conditions in the Arctic and Antrctic. Below is a less well known image made on deck where the structures of the ship grow a coat of rime frost and ice.

But I'm far more interested in this completely puzzling image (below) where an unidentified activity semms to be being carried out. Skis are plunged into the snow in an antarctic dusk and an ethereal light emanates from a hole in the snow below. I simply can't comprehend fully what's going on in the picture, and this seems to me to be highly unusual in the images both Hurley and Ponting brought back home in that nothing is "learnt" about the antarctic from this image. There appears to be no
scientific/heroic/pictorialist basis to the creation of the picture (unlike most of the others) and the purpose of the image remains unclear. (I'm guessing that perhaps a snow hole has been dug, with the occupants' artificial light illuminating the entrance, but it's still significantly obscure to continue to intrigue and hold my attention).

The image below is perhaps more conventional, but still I like the presence of the man, looking out to the ice, Caspar David Friedrich-like. With his hands in his pockets, and wearing a balaclava but no coat, braces visible, he stands so very casually as he surveys the ice and the unending immensity of the cold horizon beyond. He looks as though he might just have been passing by for a stroll when Hurley made the picture. Perhaps he was.

He also made a series of early colour images of the Expedition using the then-popular Paget process of colour photography. The colours are rather weak, and the autochrome process would supersede it, but it still comes as something of a shock to see them at all. Even it's failures hold beauty.

Mid-summer, 1915

Unidentified landscape

call

L Punton, Call, graphite on paper, 2011

the great white silence

I watched Herbert Ponting's film of the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-12 at the cinema today, where Capt. Robert Falcon Scott led the attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole. Newly restored by the BFI, the film is certainly worth seeing if you have the chance. It's redolent with an outdated version of English patrioism and heroism, but that is probably to be expected considering this was the officially sanctioned document of the expedition.

But watching it in the light of more recent criticism of Scott's strategies, notably the excellent I may be some time by Frances Spufford, the expedition's use of Siberian ponies and a forerunner to the tank to haul loads looked foolish even before they set out on their journey across the empty continent. The dogs, however, look brilliantly adapted to the task, relishing the work in the way the horses never would. Had they used the dogs to pull the sleds, they'd likely have survived to tell the tale - though perhaps we'd not still be thinking of them had the story had such a banal ending - simply coming second to the Norwegians. Amundsen in many ways deserved to reach the pole first, being less arrogant that he might "conquor" the antarctic wilderness, and humble enough to employ the survival techniques of indigenous peoples of the polar regions, rather than bringing in European style expedition tactics.

 

One can't help but think, "these men would soon die" when watching the film. Like all old photographs, they're infused with a sense of mortality, but our knowledge of the outcome of the expedition makes the sense of pathos palpable. In the end, they would die stormbound in their tent a mere 11 miles from the safety of "one ton depot". At the beginning of the film as they set sail from New Zealand, they look so strong and potent that failure must have seemed inconceivable to those around them.

What perhaps surprised me more about the film though, was the use of colour filters (not unlike the gel overlays in the 1925 Lon Chaney version of The Phantom of the Opera), creating different atmospheres for time of year, quality of light, and location. Even more noteworthy, I think, are the little animated sequences that appear to, at first, be time lapse views from high up of the sleds being manhauled over the Beardmore Glacier, but which soon become clearly made in a studio once Ponting got back home. The're a little comic, with their jerky movements, looking like bizarre dolls house props, but I found them interesting all the same. I was strangely reminded of Sonja Braas' forces series, when looking at these sections.

Sonja Braas, Forces No 10, 2002, c-print behind diasec

I did find the extended footage of the penguins a little tiresome (Werner Herzog truly got it right in Encounters at the End of the World), and their anthropomorphism in Ponting's intercut text/narrative irked a little, but there's no doubting that this is an exceptionally privileged account of an adventure and tragedy made with great skill and beauty.

the fram

Blankets from the cabin of The Fram. L Punton 2006/2011

The Fram carried both Nansen and Amundsen on their expeditions to the poles and occupies a unique position in the history of exploration, being the ship with the record of sailing both furthest north and furthest south. Visiting the Fram a few years back in Oslo, I found myself fascinated by the minutiae of it's interior, rather than it's great bulk. The details somehow suggest more of the history of it's occupants.

ice mask

Ice mask, C.T. Madigan, between 1911-1914 / photograph by Frank Hurley

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