"The Heart of the Great Alone: Scott, Shackleton and Antarctic Photography" at the Queen’s Gallery. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
Taking photographs with a large plate camera was never easy at the best of times, but in the sub-zero conditions of the Antarctic the challenges were more than daunting. Herbert Ponting, official photographer on Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole, experienced his fair share of difficulties. On one occasion, working from the expedition’s base camp at Cape Evans on Ross Island, he set out across what he took to be a solid ice field towards a picturesque group of distant icebergs. As he made his way across the frozen wastes, a group of killer whales crashed through the ice in a determined attempt to have him for lunch. Carrying heavy camera and tripod, Ponting leapt from one shattered floe to another in a frenzied dance of evasion. Scott recalled watching helplessly from a distance: "it was possible to see the whales’ tawny head markings, their small glistening eyes, and their terrible array of teeth – by far the largest and the most terrifying in the world".
Even more of a threat was frostbite. It was impossible to operate his camera with gloves on, so Ponting was constantly obliged to put himself at risk. He often felt his fingers burning at the touch of the camera’s frozen metal, and once, he remembered, "my tongue came into contact with a metal part of one of my cameras, whilst moistening my lips as I was focussing. It froze fast instantaneously; and to release myself I had to jerk it away, leaving the skin of the end of my tongue sticking to my camera."
"The Heart of the Great Alone", at the Queen’s Gallery, marks the centenary of Scott’s last journey to...
