 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 includes 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 tra