ROBERT FALCON SCOTT

As they approached the South Pole on 16th January 1912, Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his four companions hoped to find an unbroken horizon of frozen desolation, no different from the one they had crossed for weeks and months. Instead, they were confronted by a black flag planted thirty-four days earlier by Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian expedition. It was a stark marker of defeat that would precipitate one of the most tragic episodes in the history of exploration.

Whereas Amundsen’s singular goal had been to reach the South Pole, Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition, 1910–1913, combined prize-taking with scientific enquiry. Amundsen and his men moved with calculated efficiency employing equipment and techniques learned in the Arctic; Scott’s party hauled heavy loads and paused for meteorological, geological, and biological research observations. Where the Norwegian effort pursued speed, precision, and assured return, the British expedition balanced science, prestige, and empire.

Having learned the fundamentals of photographic technique and composition from Herbert Ponting - the expedition’s official photographer - the photographs taken by Scott during his journey toward the Pole carry us back to the heart of this unfolding drama. In contrast to the grand ambitions of his expedition, the quiet, unencumbered simplicity of Scott’s images capture both the vulnerability and the tenacity of the men, the dreariness of the Ice Barrier and the thrill of discovery, the weight of the sledges and the companionship of the ponies.

Whether single-frame images or sweeping panoramas assembled from multiple negatives, they offer subtle insight into the environmental, logistical, and human conditions that underpinned the expedition’s achievements - as well as its tragic failure. Rather than projecting heroism, they convey, with a restrained melancholy, the singular predicament of explorers immersed in an environment that is at once hostile and otherworldly.

The negatives exposed by Scott, from which the prints in this folio are made, did not make it all the way to the South Pole. They were brought back by the last support party and handed to Ponting for development. Although Ponting made small reference prints of each negative, and a handful of the photographs found their way into magazines and other publications, the negatives themselves went missing after his death in 1935. Only in 2012 did they re-emerge and come into the ownership of the Scott Polar Research Institute.

Jean de Pomereu