ncludes a portrait of Lady Kathleen Scott, taken shortly before her husband left for Antarctica and which he pinned up in his hut at Cape Evans. Then there's Josephine Peary, the venturesome wife of the American polar explorer Robert Peary, in an 1891 studio shot of her clad in the Inuit-style furs she wore when accompanying her husband.
More recently, a dressing-gowned Sir Vivian Fuchs gives a manic grin as he anticipates his first bath for more than three months, having completed his 2,000-mile crossing of Antarctica in 1958.
Selecting these images from the vast archive was a taxing process – although all things are relative: "I'm just a historian," says Lewis-Jones.
"I don't know the struggle of crossing the Arctic Ocean. So my struggle in trying to select these pictures was not huge in these terms, of course, but it was a real challenge. Everyone has their favourites, and obviously all the big names are there; Scott, Shackleton, Peary ...
"But my first criteria was always the quality of the photograph, regardless of who it was. Part of the joy of the selection was also the chance to bring forward the story with portraits of people who don't get books written about them."
Alternating with the historic images are the colour shots by Martin Hartley, who comments in the book that the "frozen-face look" remains by far the most requested image from any polar shoot, although his own polar portraits, while including the mandatory quotient of facial ice, also capture the cosmopolitan diversity of men and women working in the polar regions today, from adventurers and scientists to cooks and mechanics. These include the British explorer Pen Hadow, looking suitably frosted at Resolute Bay in Canada's High Arctic, one of the most northerly settlements in the world, and the expansive grin of Randy Reid, a Barbados-born chef at the South Camp Inn there – who fuels up adventurers like Hadow before they set off.
Rosie Stancer, the diminutive but determined Arctic adventurer – "a mix of Tinkerbell and Terminator" – appears training in Essex, while Sir Wally Herbert, eminent polar adventurer and artist, was photographed quietly at home in the Highlands shortly before he died last year, still exuding a sense of smouldering determination.
Hartley's studies also include Professor Hugh Brody, the anthropologist, author and film-maker who spent years living and working with the Inuit in the Arctic. And it is Brody who reminds us, in a telling afterword, that while we may think in terms of explorers pitting themselves against inhospitable northern wastes, for many people these places are home, and the book contains several striking pictures, old and new, of Inuit people.
"Too often," says Lewis-Jones, "the heroic accounts fail to mention the help that local people have given. I wanted to level things out a bit, to remind us that not only are there Inuit people for whom the Arctic is home, but it is also living space for those working there. It's not just all about people racing for the Pole."
Face to Face: Polar Portraits is published by the Scott Polar Research Institute, priced 40 hardback and 25 paperback on Monday 10 November.