THE long-distance gaze, the ice-rimmed-beard ... For well over a century now, photography has established the popular image of the polar explorer, the man – and increasingly woman – who pits themselves against mercilessly hostile elements at the ends of the earth.
From Scott and Shackleton to modern heroes such as Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the image has become almost hackneyed, as the expectations of the public – and of polar adventurers themselves, anxious to drum up public interest and support for their next expedition – demand the indomitable but frozen physiognomy.
"It has become both a staple and something of a cliche," writes Dr Huw Lewis-Jones who, as curator of art at Cambridge University's Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), has studied more than his fair share of weatherbeaten features, particularly while compiling Face to Face: Polar Portraits.
The book interleaves 50 arresting historic studies from the Institute's archives with 50 contemporary portraits commissioned from Martin Hartley, a seasoned documenter of life at the two poles and other inhospitable environments.
The book's earliest "polar portrait" is of Sir John Franklin on board the Erebus in 1845, about to depart on his ill-fated expedition to find a North-west Passage, replete with epaulettes, medals and Nelson-style cocked hat. However, it was during the "heroic age" of polar exploration, straddling the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, that photography, says Lewis-Jones, defined polar exploration in the popular imagination. "It shaped the public image of what Antarctica was, what exploration was, what it meant to be an explorer," he says.
The SPRI's vast and unique archive covers the history of exploration at both poles, and Lewis-Jones is currently engaged in digitising some 20,000 of its photographs online in the neatly titled Freeze Frame project. Those selected for the book include a study of the man after whom the institute is named, and whose diaries it holds, Robert Falcon Scott, caught in thoughtful pose.
The book opens, however, with Henry "Birdie" Bowers's famous shot of Scott and his ill-fated party at the South Pole in 1912, having reached it only to discover they had been beaten by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen (a brooding study of whom appears elsewhere in the book).
As Ranulph Fiennes – whose own, bloodied countenance is among Hartley's recent studies – writes in his foreword, the photograph, found later along with their bodies, speaks volumes, recording both their achievement and their bitter, exhausted disappointment: "The men look absolutely broken; a photograph on top of anything else seems like a punishment."
There is also Frank Hurley's portrait of the redoubtable Tom Crean, a Kerry-born stalwart of both Scott and Shackleton's expeditions, and Sir Ernest Shackleton himself – "the Boss", as he was known, relaxed-looking, caught on deck munching a sandwich. Hurley's photographs – and pioneering 35mm film work – helped Shackleton become, as Lewis-Jones records, "a master of the illustrated lecture".
But the pioneering giant of polar photography was the Californian George Herbert Ponting, the official photographer on Scott's last expedition whose self-portait appears here, looking faintly Monty-Pythonesque with his bristling moustache, snow goggles and floppy hat. The reality was serious stuff, however: "Water froze in Ponting's tanks, flesh stuck to frozen metal and outdoor photography meant a constant risk of frostbite."
Ponting's determination to capture expedition members, says Lewis-Jones, resulted in them coining a new verb, "to 'pont' – to pose until nearly frozen". While Shackleton's illustrated lectures became a sensation, says Lewis-Jones, the unfortunate Scott wasn't about to give his.
"It was men like Ponting and his good mate Cecil Meares (another photography enthusiast, whose keen gaze stares from the book's cover] who kept the images alive after Scott's death. With Ponting it wasn't just his photographs. More than anyone else, he devoted the best part of his life to lecturing about the expedition." The collection i