HERBERT PONTING
EXPLORERS
BRITISH ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION, 1910 - 1913
They stare out of photographic immortality, looking every inch the explorer-heroes of the Antarctic. Most of them were photographed as they returned to Cape Evans from supporting Captain Scott’s trek to the South Pole. The portraits record moments of glory within a great triumph; the shadow of the tragedy-to-come had not yet crossed anyone’s mind. The men are trail-worn, with hair and beards unkempt: their tans broken by the pale shadow of snow-goggles; their lips and faces in various stages of being blistered and peeled by sun, snow and the biting Antarctic wind. They haven’t washed for months.
As each supporting party returned from the Pole Journey, the expedition photographer, Herbert Ponting, was there to record it. Posing for Ponting, or Ponko, as he was more commonly nicknamed, had become something of a standing joke amongst the Expedition members. The Expedition even had its’ own verb for it. It was a play on Ponting’s name, ‘to pont’, meaning “to pose, until nearly frozen.”
Ponting recognised the documentary value of his work, but he also understood its power for publicity. These were “the men who participated in the Conquest of the Pole!” Accordingly, when Ponting sailed back to civilisation at the end of the first year of the expedition, he left detailed instructions as to how to take the portraits of the Pole Party on their return, so that the sequence might be completed. No-one imagined that they would never come back.
When telling these epic tales and thinking about the scale of the grand projects and landscapes which gave them birth, it is easy to forget that those who took part in these expeditions - the men who made it all happen - were human beings. It is easy to put them onto pedestals and worship them as heroes, or to knock them into the ditch and ridicule them as incompetence perfected, which is perhaps another kind of hero. Either way it robs them of their humanity and, somehow, of the magnitude of their achievement. These portraits help restore that human connection.
David M. Wilson