One of the great months in photographic history came in January 1911. It was then that Herbert Ponting, the official photographer on Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated ‘Terra Nova Expedition’ to the South Pole, first set foot in Antarctica.
Over the weeks that followed Ponting took many of his career-defining shots. One showed the Terra Nova exploration vessel anchored in the icy shallows of McMurdo Sound. Another framed the ship once again, but this time from inside an enchanting ‘ice grotto’ that was filled with vivid blues and greens. Yet another was a brilliantly composed view of the ramparts of Mount Erebus. It showed great, craggy towers of ice that rose high into the Polar sky and hung ominously over the frail figure of a man with a sled beneath.
At Unseen Histories, we work at the intersection of history and photography. You might well have seen some of our previous sets on Unsplash, which, among other subjects, depict the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the March on Washington.
Ponting’s photographs are of a different nature, but they have always been of great interest to us. Recently, with the anniversary of Robert Falcon Scott’s tragic death approaching (29 March) we decided that the time had come to research Ponting’s story in more detail and to create a new set of remastered and colorized images.
