rnest Shackleton, a British polar explorer, hired Frank Hurley to record, in still and moving pictures, an expedition to Antarctica, the last unexplored region on Earth. By 1914, Norway had beaten England to both the North and South poles. Now, as war loomed in Europe, Shackleton determined to win for England another polar prize: a trek across Antarctica on foot. Hoping to partly finance the expedition through advance sale of photographic, movie, and story rights, Shackleton hired Hurley. By seeking beauty in icy bleakness, Hurley changed expedition photography forever. Instead of routinely recording day-by-day activities, Hurley chose to tell a dramatic story. He produced a saga that endures in his stunning photographs.
From England the Endurance sails southward via Madeira, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires. There she loads supplies and picks up both Ernest Shackleton, leader of the expedition, and Frank Hurley, an Australian photographer who will film the expedition for Shackleton’s fund-raising Imperial Trans Antarctic Film Syndicate. Hurley had been photographer and filmmaker for Australian explorer Douglas Mawson’s 1911 expedition. Shackleton had picked Hurley after seeing his film of the Mawson expedition, “Home of the Blizzard.” Kodak contributed equipment to the expedition and exhibited Hurley’s photos in Kodak stores.
On South Georgia, Hurley shows how he works: He and two expedition officers carry some 40 pounds of camera gear up a mountaintop so that he can photograph the Endurance at anchor far below, surrounded by a wondrous snow-streaked landscape.
Hurley writes in his diary several days after the Endurance encounters the Weddell Sea ice, “All day we have been utilizing the ship as a battering ram.” Hurley clambers up a mast to get photos of the ship, which is “shattering the floes in grand style.” Where most men see nothing but ice and water and peril, Hurley inevitably sees beauty. To him, icebergs are “magnificent forms.” One day he aims his camera at “a fine cuniform mass 200 feet high.” In his diary he describes what he did next: “I photographed.”
Hurley shifts frequently from still to motion-picture camera. When seals suddenly appear, swimming and splashing around the ship, Hurley grabs his movie camera; he wants to record action. One day, to the amazement of crewmen, he lashes his “cinematograph machine” on the end of the top-gallant yard so that he can get aerial views of the pack ice. Another day he joins a scientific party off to inspect an iceberg seven and a half miles from the ship. He likes to photograph the majestic icebergs with both still and movie cameras. Once, ice began to give way and he almost fell through.
Hurley “is a marvel,” writes Frank Worsley, captain of the Endurance. “[W]ith cheerful Australian profanity he perambulates alone aloft & everywhere, in the most dangerous & slippery places he can find, content & happy at all times but cursing so if he can get a good or novel picture. Stands bare & and hair waving in the wind, where we are all gloved and helmeted, he snaps his snaps or winds his handle turning out curses of delight & pictures of Life by the fathom.”
http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0215022/explorers.htm
What an interesting information was presented today in the lesson about history of photography and photography exhibition in Maritime Museum about arctic explorers and Ernest Shackleton polar expedition!
It had brought to me a lot of memories from my childhood reading. I already don’t remember exactly which books I had read but I remember the name of Jack London only. He wrote about brave people and about Alaska probably.
How pity that nowadays children are too busy and don’t read the books. It is understandable – they read facebook and play computers games.
In my childhood we didn’t have nor the computers but first TV had only two programmes – news and sport. So we had read the books.
I wonder…climate are changing…nobody really know how, what if Gulfstream will change? And will become polar freezing in British islands? I think it is interesting subject for new blockbuster for Tim Burton or Luc Besson?
I think it is pity that I didn’t saw in the Polar exhibition school children. It is should be very interesting for them in my opinion. Maybe I am wrong.
The pictures are amazing! Frank Hurley was a real hero of his time. I can imagine how he loved his hobby (or work?) if he risked his life and in the face of death kept taking pictures and recorded such a difficult expedition.
