The Spectacle of “Nothing”: the image, material, and object in a photographic ecosystem of Antarctica

Abstract

Photographic records of early 1900s polar expeditions encapsulated a paradox: the spectacle of “monotonous” “numbing whiteness” in images of “nothing” that were intended for public exhibition. This article examines expedition photography as an ecosystem of materials and meanings to reconsider the status of the “failed” photographic experiments that have remained sublimate to the iconic images of polar exploration. Light sensitive materials — photographic emulsion layered onto glass plates and strips of flexible transparent celluloid nitrate film — are integral to the registration of the image. However, these materials are also susceptible to the effects of humidity, touch and variations in temperature. Anomalies, such as details that were effaced by overexposure to light and watermarks registered the effects of labour in a polar climate These “failed photographic plates were occluded from exhibition, yet remain integral to the ideation of the incomprehensible in polar expedition narratives. In this context, experimental and “failed” images can be read as part of an ecosystem of interactions and begins to decipher the popularity of Ponting’s 1911 photograph “Ice-Blink”, the image of a seemingly featureless ocean horizon, as the commodification of “nothing” in discursive spaces of exhibition.

Acknowledgements

This article was informed by my work as a Research Fellow at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Stephen J. Pyne, The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica (University of Washington Press, 1986), 10; and Jennifer Fay, “Antarctica and Siegfried Kracauer’s Extraterrestrial Film Theory,” In Inhospitable Worlds. Cinema in the time of the Anthropocene (New York: OUP, 2018), 162–200, 163.

2. Fay, “Antarctica and Siegfried Kracauer’s Extraterrestrial Film Theory,” 193. Royal Society Antarctic Committee, Report to the Council 1887, p. 3. Royal Society Antarctic Committee Report to the Council 1887, A. H. Markham Papers MRK/46 (97), National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

3. Robert Dixon, “What was Travel Writing? Frank Hurley and the Media Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century Australian Travel Writing,” Studies in Travel Writing 11 (2007): 59–60. Fine Art Society’s exhibition catalogue: The British Antarctic Expedition Exhibition of the Photographic Pictures of Mr Herbert G Ponting F.R.G.S., December 1913. DF211/91 Natural History Museum. The catalogue describes an exhibition that toured cities including London, Cheltenham and Manchester.

4. Herbert George Ponting was hired as a professional photographer and self-named “camera artist” on Captain R.F. Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition 1910–13. The scientific expedition included the British journey to the South Pole in 1911–12. News of the fate of Scott, Wilson, Oates, Bowers and Evans on their return journey reached Britain in 1913.

5. Herbert George Ponting, The Great White South ([London: Duckworth, 1921]. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), 170.

6. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Modernity, Contingency and the Archive (Harvard University Press, 2003); and Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2007): 128–151, 130.

7. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations no. 40 Special Issue: Seeing Science (1992): 81–128.

8. Daston and Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” 83.

9. Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 10.

10. The Scott Polar Research Institute holds numerous magic lantern slides and photographs that were taken by H. G. Ponting and later used in lectures on meteorology and geography at the University of Cambridge given by members of Captain R.F. Scott’s fated South Pole expedition 1910–13. The status of these magic lantern slides, as copies in personal collections and the cost of digitisation projects, leaves these sub-histories of the social use of photography in education and as entertainment as sublimate to the iconic images associated with the expedition. Similarly, the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich holds a collection of over 200 glass plate negatives and 220 magic lantern slides from William Colbeck’s voyages as Captain of the relief ship “Morning” for Scott’s 1901–04 “Discovery” expedition, yet only a few have been digitised. The broader collection of photographic negatives (Paget plates, black-and-white glass negatives, rolls of film) and simulacra in different media (newsprint, in photo albums, framed prints, lantern slides) reveals a history of diverse practices and interests beyond the iconic images that typify the Heroic age of polar exploration. Iconic images include Frank Hurley’s iconic flashlight photographs of Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, trapped in ice during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1914–17. Further, photographs of the performance of science for camera in the work of Herbert G. Ponting were recorded as illustrations for the lecture tours that were intended to follow the return of Scott’s fated South Pole expedition 1910–13 and to recuperate the costs of exploration.

11. The archives that I refer to include the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge; South Australasian Museum, Adelaide; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; British Film Institute; and Canterbury Museum in Christchurch New Zealand.

12. Miss Dawson-Lambton. “Album of Discovery Expedition photographs.” ALB0346.13. Greenwich: National Maritime Museum.

13. “To the South Pole with the Cinematograph”, British Journal of Photography LIX, no. 2729 (1912): 645–646, 646.

14. H. G. Ponting, “‘Gathering it in’: The Camera in the Far South” (Illustrated London News, August 26 Saturday, 1922), 318. The 1922 article is contemporary to the publication of Ponting’s written account of the 1910–13 Terra Nova expedition, titled The Great White South ([first published 1921] New York: Cooper Square, 2000).

15. Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed, Photography as Eye Witness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005), 3.

16. Tucker, Nature Exposed, 232.

17. H.J.P. Arnold, “Antarctic Pioneer,” In With Scott to the South Pole, The Terra Nova Expedition 1910–1913, The Herbert Ponting Photographs (Bloomsbury, 2004), 203−223. 217. Arnold, as editor of the British Journal of Photography, is writing about the work of “camera artist” H.G. Ponting for the British Antarctic Expedition 1910–13. Orthochromatic photographs and film rendered blue in a lighter grey tone whilst the colour red tended to appear black.

18. “Captain Scott’s Expedition, Photographs at the Fine Art Society” (The Times, December 23 Tuesday, 1913), no. 40402, 11.

19. J.O, “The Scott Expedition in Photography,” In Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser (Manchester, England), no. 17815 (December Wednesday10, 1913): 6. The numbers and descriptions of photographs in the MCLGA coincide with those in the Fine Art Society’s exhibition catalogue: The British Antarctic Expedition Exhibition of the Photographic Pictures of Mr Herbert G Ponting F.R.G.S., December 1913, DF211/91 Natural History Museum, “Ponting Photographs, Public View Opened by Mayor of Cheltenham” (Cheltenham Chronicle and Gloucestershire Graphic, February 14 Saturday, 1914), 1. Messrs W. H. Smith and Son on Cheltenham Promenade attended by 2000 people including 700 students from Cheltenham College and the Ladies’ college emphasising the educational potential of Ponting’s photographs.

20. J.O, “The Scott Expedition in Photography,” Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser (Manchester, England) no. 17815 (December Wednesday10, 1913): 6.

21. Fay, “Antarctica and Siegfried Kracauer’s Extraterrestrial Film Theory,” 166.

22. Gunnar Iversen, “A View Aesthetic without a View? Space and Place in Early Norwegian Polar Expedition Films,” In The Image in Early Cinema, Form and Material, eds. Scott Curtis, Philippe Gauthier, Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 102–108, 106. The images that Iversen reads as devoid of features, might, I suggest, also be studies of ice formations, ridges eroded by the wind, the remnants of unsuccessful experiments of interest to meteorologists and geographers, or the effects of deterioration, such as the fading of lantern slides and film prints under the heat of the projector lamp.

23. Iversen, “A View Aesthetic without a View?”, 106.

24. Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View”, Art Journal 42, no.4 (Winter 1982): 311–319. 314 and 315.

25. Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” 317–318.

26. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema?, Translated by Hugh Gray, 1 vols. (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2005), 9–16. The complexity and connectedness of digital and analogue film and photography is discussed in texts by scholars and archivists including Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam University Press, [2009] 2021).

27. Julia Martin and David Coleman, “Change the Metaphor: The Archive as Ecosystem,” JEP: The Journal of Electronic Publishing 7, no. 3 (2002). Models. Accessed 25 February 2021. https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0007.301. Martin and Coleman refer to the use of electronic databases and publications as an ecosystem in which writers, readers, speakers are actants.

28. Elizabeth Edwards, “Thoughts on the ‘Non-Collections’ of the Archival Ecosystem”, In Photo-Objects, On the Materiality of photographs and Photo Archives in the Humanities and Sciences, eds. Julia Bärnighausen, Constanza Caraffa, Stefanie Klamm, Franka Schneider, Petra Wodtke (Firenze: Max Planck Research Library, 2021), pp.67–82.

29. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 208-209.

30. William Colbeck, “Observations on the Antarctic Sea-Ice,” The Geographical Journal 25, no. 4 (April 1905): pp.401–405.

31. Clement Markham, National Antarctic Expedition Relief Ship. Pamphlet. Thomas Henry Tizard Papers, Royal Museums Greenwich. TI/48(5) An appeal for sponsorship authored by Sir Clement Markham as President of the Royal Geographical Society to fund relief ship for the Discovery, which overwintered in Antarctica, trapped in the ice.

32. Royal Society Antarctic Committee Report to the Council 1887 (minutes of meeting written by M Foster January 19, 1888), Admiral A. H. Markham Papers. MRK/46 (97). National Maritime Museum Greenwich.

33. Royal Society Antarctic Committee Report to the Council 1887 (minutes of meeting written by M Foster January 19, 1888), 3. Admiral A. H. Markham Papers. MRK/46 (97). Royal Museums Greenwich.

34. Colbeck’s naming of Haggitt’s Pillar and Scott Island is recorded in his journals, although the official status of this territorial act is unclear.

35. Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” 315.

36. Colbeck, “Observations on the Antarctic Sea-Ice,” 404–405.

37. Anon, “Practical Methods in Photographic View Publishing,” British Journal of Photography [BJP], (April 12, 1912): 284–285.

38. Doane 2007, 131.

39. Instructions from R. F. Scott to Charles Royds. 9 September 1902. MSS/88/003, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

40. Charles Royds, Journals of the “Discovery” Expedition. Thursday 9 October 1902. MSS/88/003. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Edward, A. Wilson, Lecture Notes 1910–13, MS1225/3. Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge. Wilson was member of scientific staff on the Discovery 1901–04 and Terra Nova 1910–13 expeditions to Antarctica.

41. Robert Falcon Scott, “National Antarctic Expedition. Report from the Commander,” January 1902–February 1903. Report to the Presidents of the Royal Society and Royal Geographical Societies of England. P.18. T. H. Tizard Papers TIZ/49/11 (1). National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

42. Carsten E. Borchgrevink, “The “Southern Cross” Expedition to the Antarctic, 1899–1900,” The Geographical Journal XVI, no.4 (1900): 381–411, 385. Louis Bernacchi worked as the magnetic and meteorological observer alongside Colbeck on Borchgrevink’s British Antarctic Expedition 1898–1900 on the Southern Cross.

43. Louis Bernacchi, “The Eschenhagen Magnetic Instruments,” The South Polar Times (1902): 31. The SPT, written and printed in Antarctica, was orientated around the morale and sponsorship of the expedition.

44. For example, a superior mirage produced is produced by the different refractive index of warm air over cold water, where cold air close to the sea is denser with a higher refractive index.

45. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce, 2 Vols. Elements of Logic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1932), 159.

46. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 15.

47. Yusoff, “Antarctic Exposure: Archives of the Feeling Body,” Cultural Geographies 14/2 (2007): 211–33, 218 and 221. The damaged body is rarely visible in expedition narratives. A still photograph of Atkinson’s frost bitten hand, which is included in the EYE Filmmuseum print of Expeditie naar de Zuidpool as Ponting’s film of Scott’s fated South Pole expedition, is unusual and did not appear in copies held at the British national Film Archives or the BFI 2010 digital and photochemical restoration of the photographer’s 1924 edit The Great White Silence.

48. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 14; and Doane 2003, 3.

49. André Bazin, “Cinema and Exploration,” In What is Cinema? Volume 1, Translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley and London: University of California: Berkeley and London, 2005), 154−163, 162.

50. Mawson Collection. Letter. 6 July 1914. AAE170. South Australasian Museum, Adelaide.

51. Cherry-Garrard, Apsley, “Mr H. G. Ponting (Obituary),” The Geographic Journal 85 (1935): 391.

52. Doane, 2003, 45.

53. Ponting. Letter to Apsley Cherry Garrard, 17 December 1913. MS559/102/2, SPRI, Cambridge.

54. Ponting [1921] 2000, 200. Ponting refers to Simpson’s notes on Professor Störmer’s method of photographing constellations, but cites the rapidity of lenses, photographic plates, and duration of exposure as problematic. Simpson was meteorologist on the expedition; his doctoral research was on the Aurora Borealis.

55. Herbert George Ponting. The Great White South, first published London: Duckworth, 1921 (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), p.198.

56. J.O, “The Scott Expedition in Photography,” Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser (Manchester, England) no. 17815 (December 10 Wednesday, 1913): 6; and Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” 31.

57. Exhibition Catalogue, The British Antarctic Expedition 1910–13. Exhibition of the Photographic Pictures of Mr Herbert G Ponting FRGS (London: Fine Art Society, 1913), 10.

58. H.G. Ponting, Letter to Frank Debenham, 15 June 1926. British Antarctic Expedition 1910–13. MS280/28/7. Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge.

59. Ibid.

60. Fay, “Antarctica and Siegfried Kracauer’s Extraterrestrial Film Theory,” 173.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Liz Watkins

Liz Watkins, University of Leeds. Watkins’ research interests include theories, technologies, and materiality of colour in cinema; sexuality and the image; contingency; and the history and ethics of colourisation and the archive. She has published essays on feminist theory, desire, excess, film materials and texts in Journal for Cultural Research and Parallax and has co-edited collections on Color and the Moving Image (New York: Routledge 2013), and Gesture and Film (London: Routledge 2017). Her book project, with Routledge, is on the materiality, immateriality of colour in cinema.