Herbert Ponting: Scott’s Antarctic Photographer and Pioneer Filmmaker

by Anne Strathie

Born in Salisbury in 1870, Ponting was raised and educated in Carlisle, Preston and Southport. While working in a bank in Liverpool, Ponting bought his first Kodak compact camera. A decade later – after running a California fruit ranch and working in mining – he was a professional photographer, known for stereoviews of America, Japan and other parts of Asia and for illustrated magazine articles.
 
When Ponting returned to Britain in 1907, his Japanese and other photographs were exhibited and published widely. In 1909, while working on a memoir of Japan, he signed up for Scott’s Terra Nova expedition – two years later, he was back in London, working on thousands of photographs and film footage of the expedition.

In February 1913, the news broke that Scott and his South Pole companions had died. Overnight Ponting’s photographs became world famous. But in 1914, while Ponting was giving cinema-lectures on the expedition, war broke out. His offers to serve as a photographer or correspondent were declined, but in 1918 he and Ernest Shackleton joined a government-backed expedition to Spitsbergen. During the turbulent 1920s and 1930s Ponting wrote his memoir The Great White South , reworked his Antarctic films into full-length silent and ‘talkie’ versions and worked on cinematic inventions.
 
Anne Strathie’s new biography includes previously unpublished material and images , including on Ponting’s correspondence with photographic magnate George Eastman, his friendship with Shackleton’s photographer Frank Hurley, his late-life romance with singer Glae Carrodus and the establishment of his photographic and cinematic legacy.
 

272 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2021

Reviews

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Captain Scott’s name is well known of course, and his expedition to the South Pole the stuff of legend, but the names of the team who made it all possible aren't perhaps so familiar. Author Anne Strathie’s books explore some of these lesser known men, starting with Birdie Bowers, the youngest member, in her first book, then Harry Pennell the navigator in the second and now Herbert Ponting (1870-1935) in the third. Ponting was the official photographer and film-maker of the expedition, and the first professional photographer to travel to Antarctica and take images. Ponting started life following his father into banking, but soon realised such a sedentary life wasn’t for him, and went to America, where he ended up buying a fruit farm and marrying an American. He’d always been a keen photographer and now began to show his work, soon embarking on a new career as a freelance photographer, travelling the world and gaining a reputation for his expertise. On the basis of this reputation Scott recruited him as his official photographer, and although the expedition ended in disaster, we have Ponting’s photographs and films as a lasting record, work which he spent the rest of his life promoting. Strathie’s research for her book is impressive indeed. Ponting was a private man, and we have no diaries and few letters, but the author has left no stone unturned to discover as much as possible and the result is a wonderfully comprehensive and detailed biography of a pioneering image and film maker. Camera enthusiasts will no doubt find especial delight in the details of Ponting’s camera and film equipment. The book is lavishly illustrated, and the notes demonstrate what a serious piece of research the book is. But it is also extremely readable and accessible, and a compelling exploration of a man, his times and his work.

[John Appleton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book after seeing an excellent exhibition of Ponting's work at the museum in Southport - his work being of such an excellent quality to make me wish to find out more about him. Though it would be easy to get the impression that the book only covers his Antarctic adventures, that's not the case.

We can loosely divide the book into three parts - One, his beginnings as a photographer and travels around Asia, particularly Japan. Secondly, we have the coverage of his involvement with Scott's Ill-fated Terra Nova expedition. These two sections both have much to recommend to those interested in travel and early photography. The final section, which takes up around half the book, is more about his lecturing, business deals and attempts to have films and photographs exhibited on both side of the Atlantic.

And it's this final section that held the least interest for me. It's really just a lot of dry detail, a stark contrast to the rich images invoked by the descriptions of his travels in Asia and Antarctica. I can't help feeling that the earlier parts of the book could have done with more, and the final part with less.

Despite that, it has served its purpose in educating me further about Ponting, and to a degree, the Terra Nova expedition. But I probably should have given up about half way.

[Matt Mcgee · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love photography. I love photographing cold landscapes. I actually read this while in a cold landscape (Greenland.) I thought I would love this book, but I had a hard time finishing it, but I felt like I owed it to the photographers who came before me to document the polar regions.