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The tension between emotive/aesthetic and analytic/scientific motifs in the work of amateur visual documenters of Antarctica’s Heroic Era

journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-19, 03:06 authored by Millar, P
Visual documenters made a major contribution to the recording of the Heroic Era of Antarctic exploration. By far the best known were the professional photographers, Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley, hired to photograph British and Australasian expeditions. But a great number of images – photographs and artworks – were also produced by amateurs on lesser known European expeditions and a Japanese one. These amateurs were sometimes designated official illustrators, often scientists recording their research. This paper offers a discursive examination of illustrations from the Belgian Antarctic Expedition (1897–1899), German Deep Sea Expedition (1898–1899), German South Polar Expedition (1901–1903), Swedish South Polar Expedition (1901–1903), French Antarctic Expedition (1903–1905) and Japanese Antarctic Expedition (1910–1912), assessing their representations of exploration in Antarctica in terms of the tension between emotive/aesthetic and systematic analytic/scientific motifs. Their depictions were influenced by their illustrative skills and their ‘ways of seeing’, produced from their backgrounds and the sponsorship needs of the expedition.

History

Publication title

Polar Record

Volume

53

Pagination

245-256

ISSN

0032-2474

Department/School

Faculty of Education

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Place of publication

United Kingdom

Rights statement

Copyright 2017 Cambridge University Press

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Other culture and society not elsewhere classified

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