A person separate: H.G. Ponting photographer on Scott s last expedition

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1 The Polar Journal ISSN: X (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: A person separate: H.G. Ponting photographer on Scott s last expedition Pat Millar To cite this article: Pat Millar (2011) A person separate: H.G. Ponting photographer on Scott s last expedition, The Polar Journal, 1:1, 76-86, DOI: / X To link to this article: Published online: 08 Jun Submit your article to this journal Article views: 797 Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

2 The Polar Journal Vol. 1, No. 1, June 2011, A person separate: H.G. Ponting photographer on Scott s last expedition Pat Millar* University of Tasmania, Australia H.G. Ponting was the official photographer on Capt. Scott s last expedition. An enigmatic man, he was already an international success before Antarctica, and had fashioned for himself a world photographer persona which was deeply important to him. He had difficulty, however, in sustaining close relationships. In the closed environment of Antarctica, that construction of identity was reinforced, his skills were developed to their highest point, and personal and professional identities merged further. This paper examines the literature, correspondence and Ponting photographs to throw further light on the man and his outstanding work. Keywords: Heroic Era photography; Robert Falcon Scott; British Antarctic Expedition Herbert George Ponting ( ) was the first professional photographer to work in Antarctica. Selected by R.F. Scott to record and document the British Antarctic Expedition ( ), Ponting produced over 1000 still photographs, a pioneering and acclaimed cine-film, 90 South: With Scott to the Antarctic, and a successful book, The Great White South. His images of the ultimately tragic enterprise are vivid constructions of the realities of Antarctica and the expedition, as he perceived them. A connecting theme throughout the work is Ponting s expression of his own personal and professional role. A complex man who wanted close relationships yet resisted them, he remained something of a loner, his sense of personal identity strongly merged with the professional one. Ponting had begun working in travel and landscape photography around He was a news photographer; took photographs for many prominent magazines and was well paid for it; travelled extensively in Europe, America, Siberia, the Far East, South-East Asia and India; and published a book of photographs of Japan. He was passionately interested in technique, and used his ability to create pictures of appealing composition, lighting and tone. After years of sometimes intense argument, photography had become generally accepted as an established form of art. 1 There is no evidence that Ponting ever took much interest in this debate, apart from describing himself as camera artist, a term then in common usage. While others attributed artistic qualities and associations to his work, 2 he himself remained a pragmatist with a keen sense of what would be most attractive to his audience. To this end he tended to seek out the * Patricia.Millar@utas.edu.au, 1 Newhall, History of Photography from Arnold, Photographer of the World, 33. ISSN X print/issn online 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: / X

3 The Polar Journal 77 picturesque and to compose with awareness of aesthetic appeal, but not to embellish and dramatize as would that other great Antarctic photographer, Frank Hurley. When Ponting undertook the appointment on the British Antarctic Expedition, his career was already successful and he was a person of international notability. His close relationships had suffered, however. He had separated from his American wife and two young children by 1906, apparently having told his wife that an artist should not be tied down by family responsibilities. 3 Little correspondence has survived which might throw light on the marriage. Arnold quotes from an unacknowledged source in which Ponting told his father at the time of the separation that he was a desperate man and was ready for the river. 4 Apart from one attempt to meet with the children in 1910, prevented by his departure for Antarctica, and one known expression of regret later in life, Ponting never showed interest in them again. He did include them in his will, but specifically excluded his wife. His biographer Arnold speculates that he may have been incapable of sustaining close relationships. [He] never became an explorer or a team-man. He remained primarily a single-minded and superb photographer [ ] He remained a loner to the end. 5 He came to identify closely with his successful occupation. At a crucial moment in his book The Great White South, Ponting says he thought: Without my cameras I was helpless. At all costs [ ] my precious kit should be saved [ ] We would survive or sink together, 6 and there is the sense here that he refers to something wider and deeper than his brief in Antarctica. Figure 1. Herbert Ponting and the cinematograph. Source: Reproduced with permission of the Royal Geographical Society. 3 Arnold, in Riffenburgh, Cruwys, and Arnold, With Scott to the Pole. 4 Arnold, Photographer of the World, Ibid., Ponting, Great White South, 70.

4 78 P. Millar Unlike artists and photographers in other Antarctic expeditions of the period, Ponting s role was exclusively devoted to this work. This set him apart. It was complex and difficult in the freezing cold. The equipment was bulky and moving it around was laborious. Touching freezing metal camera parts could cause frostbite; the cameras required careful attention to prevent condensation accumulating when they were brought into the hut; glass plates had to be stored outside, in an equipment depot, and brought inside over a period of two days, to prevent flaws developing on them. Ponting s darkroom set him apart physically from the other expeditioners, and he spent long hours in it. As he said in The Great White South: Fifty feet of [cine-] film lasts for less than a minute on the screen; but to develop, fix, and wash that quantity of negative took about an hour and a half [ ] It took over a hundred hours during the winter to develop and wash the negatives [ ] In addition, there were many hundreds of glass negatives to be developed. 7 Riffenburgh and Cruwys claim Ponting won the respect of the other expeditioners early, engaging in all manner of contortionist efforts to obtain the best possible photographs and footage 8 during their voyage south. But in Antarctica he was too busy photographing to help set up base, and when he himself needed help with heavy unloading, none was forthcoming. There was some envy: Debenham wrote Ponting [ ] has the photo lab all to himself with a stove ; 9 and another scientist complained, Our noble friend Ponting has the softest time. 10 Later, in the spirit of larkiness 11 which characterized much of the activity at the base, the expeditioners invented a new verb to describe their participation in Ponting s photography: to pont, meaning to hold a pose, sometimes in uncomfortable positions, in the freezing cold. Even then they Figure 2. Ponting lecturing on Japan using lantern slides. Source: Reproduced with permission of the Royal Geographical Society. 7 Ibid., Riffenburgh, Cruwys, and Arnold, With Scott to the Pole, Quoted in Back, Quiet Land, Hanley, Griffith Taylor Collection, Moss, Scott s Last Biscuit, 100.

5 12 Bull and Wright, Silas: The Antarctic Diaries, Arnold, in Riffenburgh, Cruwys, and Arnold, With Scott to the Pole. 14 Description by another journalist of the time, quoted by Arnold in ibid., Ibid., Ponting, Great White South, 182. The Polar Journal 79 were not all tolerant of his demands: physicist Charles Wright wrote, The photographer Ponting is an abominable nuisance. 12 They were, however, appreciative of the lantern lecture entertainments he treated them to. Ponting recognized the role of these lectures in enhancing his status among the men, and made a composite photograph that he included in The Great White South. The expeditioner Cecil Meares wrote a mock poem that Arnold 13 believes reflected the affection of the expeditioners: I ll sing a little song, about one among our throng, Whose skill in making pictures is not wanting. He takes pictures while you wait, prices strictly moderate ; I refer, of course, to our Professor Ponting. Then pont, Ponko, pont and long may Ponko pont; With his finger on the trigger of his gadget. For whenever he s around, we re sure to hear the sound Of his high-speed cinematographic ratchet. The poem was printed in the expedition s South Polar Times, edited by Apsley Cherry- Garrard, but Ponting made no mention of it in his book The Great White South. Perhaps he did not appreciate the gentle mockery, its depiction of him as fussy and quaint. To make things worse, its author, Meares, had known Ponting during the Russo-Japanese War, where Ponting s reputation had been the foremost war photographer in the Far East [ ] the only one who had the gumption to travel through these regions photographing [ ] in spite of frequent arrests and danger of prolonged military imprisonment. 14 His disregard of discomfort and danger in search of good photographs was noted early by the other expeditioners. He had even been attacked by killer whales, a terrifying incident which he described in The Great White South. He included there a copy of a painting by Ernest Linzell, who drew it from photographs and from models of killer whales in a museum. An undated photograph 15 shows Ponting re-enacting his movements when under attack. The pose is very similar to that in the painting, and it may be that this was one of Linzell s sources. It is possible, too, that Ponting had commissioned the painting, which would say something about his need to reinforce a certain self-image. Among the expeditioners, however, the image of the Meares poem was probably the one that prevailed. In his book Ponting did mention his nickname Ponko and the men s use of the verb to pont, saying on one occasion: I was once again the butt for no end of twitting about the peril of ponting for Ponko. 16 He also included his own poem, The Sleeping Bag, the first part of which is presented here as an indication of his sense of humour: On the outside grows the furside, on the inside grows the skinside; So the furside is the outside, and the skinside is the inside. As the skinside is the inside, and the furside is the outside; One Side likes the skinside inside, and the furside on the outside. Others like the skinside outside, and the furside on the inside; As the skinside is the hard side, and the furside is the soft side. you turn the skinside outside, thinking you will side with that Side, Then the soft side furside s inside, which some argue is the wrong side [ ]

6 80 P. Millar Figure 3. Ernest Linzell, Attacked by killer whales, c Source: Ponting, The Great White South, facing 63. Reproduced with permission of Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest NSW. It is wordplay, and a situational humour best appreciated by those constantly getting into sleeping bags a bonding humour. He wanted to show that he was one of them. This representation he strenuously maintained in the years after the expedition. Promoting his public lectures, he sometimes used a mascot toy penguin, which he reminiscently named Ponko. 17 Expeditioners who wrote books about their experience appreciated Ponting s work and his contribution to their recreation, but did not really see him as one of them. Evans mentions him only a few times in his book written around He does, however, illustrate it with 31 photographs by Herbert Ponting, FRGS, including one of Ponting himself, with penguins. Evans writes that the greatest treat of all during the midwinter festivities was the exhibition of wonderful slides in which Ponting, who had been everywhere with his camera, recorded the expedition s daily life. 18 Cherry- Garrard mentions him several times, most warmly in regard to the lantern lectures: No officer nor seaman [ ] could have had too many [ ] [The lectures] gave us glimpses into many lands illustrated by his own inimitable slides. 19 Scott s journals refer a number of times to Ponting. On first landing on the continent, Ponting was enraptured and using expressions which in anyone else and alluding to any other subject might be deemed extravagant. 20 Later, Scott wrote that Ponting spent most of his time in his darkroom, and commented that I would not imply that he is out of sympathy with the work of others, which is far from being the case, but that his energies centre devotedly on the minutiae of his business. 21 When 17 National Maritime Museum (undated). A super Ponko penguin. 18 Evans, South with Scott, 113, Cherry-Garrard, Worst Journey in the World, Scott, Journals: Captain Scott s Last Expedition, Ibid., 187.

7 The Polar Journal 81 the winter interfered with photography, Scott noted that Ponting s nervous temperament is of the quality to take this wintering experience badly. 22 Scott felt he got to know Ponting better when being taught the rudiments of photography so that photographs could be taken at the Pole: My incursion into photography has brought me in close touch with him and I realise what a very good fellow he is; no pains are too great for him to take to help and instruct others, whilst his enthusiasm for his own work is unlimited. 23 Ponting makes many references in The Great White South to his admiration and liking for Scott. Early in the book, after summing up his own successes as an international photographer, he says he was drawn strongly to the famous explorer at my first meeting with him. 24 He seems to have been flattered by Scott s acknowledgement of his worth. Two of his portraits of Scott show the different sides of The Leader, as Ponting often refers to him. The first was taken on 12 April 1911 after the Southern Journey to lay depots of provisions for the polar attempt. This is Scott, the great explorer. The Southern Journey had been very hard: five ponies had died, and a dog-team had fallen into a crevasse. They had got them out with difficulty, Scott single-handedly rescuing the last two. He had regretfully laid his final depot short of its intended location. All photographs are about ways of looking, about gazes of photographer, subjects, and viewer, which may intersect dynamically. 25 Scott is looking at the photographer, and at us, in a visual form of direct address. Acknowledging us explicitly, the subject asks something of us. To construct the image s message, the viewer will draw on the cultural models 26 which are operant in his or her sociocultural group. Cultural models are families of connected images. They guide actions and interactions, and are used in judgement. Scott in this photograph might be likened to a knight of chivalry, a cultural model which was revived in British society and the arts from the late eighteenth century to World War I, 27 and to which Ponting would refer in his Preface to The Great White South. The Leader is on a quest. The viewer is being invited to engage with the courage and worthiness of the quest. There is, however, a certain aloofness in the facial expression which suggests Scott keeps his distance. Ponting knew him to be a man at times reticent [ ] silently weighted with the problems of the future. 28 The stance and facial expression are resolute, but the eyes are tired and knowing. This is Scott pared down to the essence of his eventual legend. It is a powerful image of human endeavour albeit a particular kind: heroic masculine endeavour as typically represented in the iconography of Heroic Age expeditioners. With the viewer s hindsight, it also works as an inspiring image of the indomitability of the human spirit, and as a sombre reminder of human fallibility. The image projects endurance and capability; but he did lay that last depot too short, and that would turn out to be disastrous. The rugged look is in contrast to another photograph, Scott writing his journal, taken in the spring of 1911, not long before he would leave on the polar journey. This 22 Ibid., Ibid., Ponting, Great White South, Lutz and Collins, Reading National Geographic. 26 Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. 27 Girouard, Return to Camelot. 28 Ponting, Great White South, 165.

8 82 P. Millar Figure 4. Scott, 12 April Source: reproduced with permission of the Royal Geographical Society. time his gaze ignores the viewer, but we do not feel excluded; it is more as if we have happened by his cubicle, and caught him, unobserved, in the act of a regular and dedicated task. The items around him are allusions to his background and life at home, all carefully selected with space constraints in mind. On a separate level, they serve as props for the way Scott chose to present himself to his men: the Leader, the naval officer, self-contained, a thinker, reader and writer; but also a family man, a human being who loves and is loved. Ponting told Cherry-Garrard four months after the news of Scott s death that he was thinking of sending a fine framed enlargement of this photograph to Kathleen Scott. 29 In 1917 Ponting wrote to her that not even dear old Uncle Bill knew your husband s inmost heart better than I did, 30 and to Debenham in February 1926 that Scott had many intimate talks [ ] with me in my darkroom with closed doors. Some of those talks were of so intimate a nature that they will remain locked forever in my breast. But I know what his ideas were for the future and I have tried to carry them out Letter to Cherry-Garrard, 14 June Letter to Cherry-Garrard, 6 February Quoted by Lynch, Worst Location in the World, 302.

9 The Polar Journal 83 Figure 5. Scott writing his journal in the Cape Evans hut, 7 Oct Source: reproduced with permission of the Royal Geographical Society. Scott writing his journal is a representation of the man with whom Ponting would have had those quiet talks in his darkroom. But there is no corroborating evidence of his claimed level of intimacy with Scott. It is likely that the talks meant more to Ponting than they did to Scott, and that they came to mean even more retrospectively, after Scott s death. Ponting says in The Great White South that, before the departure of the polar party, Uncle Bill Wilson gave him a parcel containing his sketches, asking Ponting to take charge of it, and to deliver it to his wife. 32 Although Ponting says he was much pleased at this expression of friendship, in the end he preferred [ ] not to take the responsibility of being the bearer of the valuable parcel, and managed to hand it to Lieut Pennell, to be placed in the Terra Nova s safe, and thence forwarded home by registered parcels post. The incident is in keeping with Ponting s ambivalence with regard to friendship: part of him wanted it, but the other part preferred to remain at some distance. Ponting s separateness is captured in a self-portrait, working in his darkroom. In it, he is dramatized by a striking contrast of darkness and light. The camera artist, as he always referred to himself, is focused and calm. A principal emphasis of the expedition was scientific, and Ponting saw his visual records as an adjunct to this and an important contribution to understanding Antarctica. In this photograph he looks more like a scientist than an artist. In The Great White South he refers to the darkroom as my laboratory. 33 Perhaps this self-portrait was partly a statement of equality. As in the majority of Ponting s self-portraits, the identity constructed is explicitly linked to his being a camera artist. He used the tools of his trade to reinforce, within representation, the world photographer persona he had fashioned for himself in the 32 Ponting, Great White South, Ibid., 124.

10 84 P. Millar Figure 6. Herbert Ponting at work in the darkroom, 22 July Source: reproduced with permission of the Royal Geographical Society. decade before he met Scott. In the closed environment of Antarctica, that construction of identity was reinforced, his skills were developed to their highest point, and personal and professional identities merged further. His pictures of himself working in Antarctica served a self-validating function. Throughout The Great White South, Ponting is a presence with which the reader quickly comes to feel comfortable. Nevertheless, he reveals only a limited amount about himself, and certainly not the inmost soul 34 that he said the hut conditions revealed of all the little band of men. Even after close study of his work, Ponting the man remains in many ways very private. Photographs of the darkroom show none of the personal items we see in the portrait of Scott in his space. Ponting knew how to be sociable, yet there was always a separateness in him. Meares poem about him in the expedition s South Polar Times refers to him, banteringly but revealingly, as Professor Ponting, as well as the friendlier Ponko. After the expedition, Ponting never attended reunions. When the men drank to Sweethearts and Wives at the Midwinter Dinner, we have no idea of whom he thought, if anyone. He says that his inseparable companions were his cameras. 35 In Herbert Ponting at work in the darkroom, once again, he does not reveal much about himself. It is a very private self-portrait. Ponting quite frequently represented himself in photographs, but rarely with other people. He did not include himself in major large group celebration photographs, although he could have managed it technically. He seems to have wanted to emphasize, both during and after the expedition, that he was very much part of it, but he was at the same time acutely aware of his separateness from the others. A sense of alienation, it has been argued, is what compels photographers to put a camera between themselves and their subjects Ponting, Great White South, Ibid., Sontag, On Photography, 10.

11 The Polar Journal 85 It has been claimed that the Antarctic ice was a blank mirror reflecting back at the explorers their own characters. 37 In The Great White South Ponting described the scene where the face of the Barne Glacier meets the sea-ice, and its effect on him: 38 The prospect that opened out was of arresting grandeur [ ] It was not so much the austere beauty of the scene that so dominated me, as its utter desolation, and its intense and wholly indescribable loneliness. I stood awhile beneath the shivering stars, with every sense alert, striving to detect some sound; but the stillness about me was profound [ ] I knew then what Service meant when he wrote: Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear, And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear? An eerie feeling crept over me in the presence of this majesty of silence: a feeling of exhilaration and awe [ ] Sledger at the foot of glacier and Mt Erebus is one of Ponting s last efforts to engage with the Antarctic landscape, and it tells us much about its effect on him. It is a crushing presence, irresistible to the artist, but reflecting back at him to an overwhelming degree his personal sense of being alone. Figure 7. Sledger at the foot of glacier and Mt Erebus. Source: reproduced with permission of the Royal Geographical Society. 37 Pyne, The Ice. 38 Ponting, Great White South,

12 86 P. Millar On his return from Antarctica, Ponting was at the peak of his career. His photography was recognized as seminal, and an intrinsic part of the promotion of Antarctic science. He presented many illustrated lectures, made a number of versions of the cine-film he had shot in Antarctica, and wrote The Great White South. But he was first embittered by disputes over rights to the exploitation of his photography, then shattered by the news of the death of Scott and the others. He did a little portrait work, mostly unremarkable, and became involved in the development of unsuccessful inventions. The reasons for his renunciation of serious photography are unclear. For years he received continuing assignment offers, but chose instead to devote much of his time to reworking his film of the expedition. He wrote in 1931, I felt that my duty was to try to keep the Scott story alive in every way I could. 39 The final version of the film would continue his representation of Scott on the two levels an individual who was a friend, and a Leader of courage and determination. Antarctica had become an obsession dominating Ponting s life. On a personal level, in his obsession he was also validating his own part on the expedition, his camera artist persona, his life. References Andrews, L. Antarctic Eye: The Visual Journey. Mt Rumney, Tas: Studio One, Arnold, H.J.P. Photographer of the World: The Biography of Herbert Ponting. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, Back, J.D., ed. The Quiet Land: The Diaries of Frank Debenham. Bluntisham: Bluntisham Books, Bull, C., and P.F. Wright, eds. Silas: The Antarctic Diaries and Memoir of Charles S. Wright. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, Cherry-Garrard, A. The Worst Journey in the World. London: Pimlico, Evans, E.G.R. South with Scott. London and Glasgow: Collins, Gee, J.P. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge, Girouard, M. The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, Hanley, W., ed. The Griffith Taylor Collection: Diaries and Letters of a Geographer in Antarctica. Armidale, NSW: Department of Geography, University of New England, Lutz, C., and J. Collins, Reading National Geographic. Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, Lynch, D. The Worst Location in the World: Herbert G. Ponting in the Antarctic, Film History 3, no. 4 (1989): Moss, S. Scott s Last Biscuit: The Literature of Polar Exploration. Oxford: Signal Books, National Maritime Museum. A Super Ponko Penguin. [Undated.] upload/pdf/ponko_article2.pdf (accessed 18 July 2009). Newhall, B. The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day. London: Secker & Warburg, Ponting, H.G. Correspondence. Herbert Ponting Collection, The Thomas H. Manning Polar Archives, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. Ponting, H.G. The Great White South. New York: Cooper Square Press, Pyne, S. The Ice. London: Phoenix, Riffenburgh, B., E. Cruwys, and H.J.P. Arnold. With Scott to the Pole: The Terra Nova Expedition : The Photographs of Herbert Ponting. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, Scott, R.F. Journals: Captain Scott s Last Expedition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Sontag, S. On Photography. New York: Dell, Quoted by Lynch, Worst Location in the World, 294.