Nigel Atherton, Editor
‘Grotto in an iceberg’, 1911,
by Herbert Ponting
I have many favourite
photographs but I’m
going to pick this one by
Herbert Ponting, the
photographer who
accompanied Captain Scott’s ill-fated
Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica.
It’s as perfect a photograph as you
could ever wish to take. A
breathtakingly beautiful ice cave,
carved by nature out of an iceberg,
provides a sublime frame for the Terra
Nova, anchored in the distance. Taken
near the expedition’s winter camp at
Ross Island, Ponting photographed it
both with and without his fellow team
members, Thomas Griffith Taylor and
Charles Wright, in the foreground –
but for me the figures add human
scale and a sense of poignancy, given
our knowledge of the ultimate tragic
fate of that expedition.
It’s an extraordinary image in its
own right, but when you consider the
effort involved in lugging that plate
camera about and then fiddling with
glass plates in those freezing
conditions, I am in awe whenever I
look at it... which is almost every day,
as I have a large framed print of this
picture in my house.