From studies made on David Livingstone's 1858-63 Zambezi expedition, Thomas Baines, the official artist, painted Shibadda, or Two Channel Rapid above the Kebrabasa [Rapids] (c. 1859) in Mozambique. In the foreground stand two Europeans, one of them Baines himself, while at the bottom right-hand corner two men are discovered photographing with a large plate camera. These were Charles Livingstone (1821-73), the explorer's brother and photographer to the expedition, and the scientist and medical officer Dr John Kirk. However, practical obstacles, and Livingstone's limited ability, seem to have prevented him taking any successful pictures, and Kirk's—of trees and other static subjects—were the only ones to survive. Later, on an expedition to the Victoria Falls, Baines noted ‘the difficulties in the way of a photographer’ in Africa: ‘the restlessness of the sitters … the different conditions of atmosphere and intensity of the sun—the constant dust raised either by our people or the wind—the whirlwinds upsetting the camera … combine to frustrate the efforts of the operator.’ Such problems meant that photography was little used outside Europe and the USA before c. 1865. Nevertheless, even if the results were often meagre, the camera was regarded as a scientific tool that could capture empirical data about the unknown world, and document discoveries for the public at home.
One of the earliest sets of photographs of eastern Africa was taken on the Royal Geographical Society's (RGS) 1860-3 East African Expedition by Colonel J. A. Grant (1827-92) who, with J. H. Speke, had been funded to find the source of the Nile. However, the only pictures taken were of the expedition's point of departure, Zanzibar. After a handful of images were made of the town and its inhabitants (including manacled slaves in the market), technical difficulties led to the camera being abandoned. Between 1860 and 1880, explorers either travelled with a professional photographer or operated the camera themselves. Désiré Charnay, John Thomson, J. W. Lindt, Francis Frith, Samuel Bourne, and Timothy O'Sullivan were all photographer-explorers. Thomson, who travelled throughout Asia between 1858 and 1875, advised explorers and travellers on how to use the camera, and published articles on photography in early travel guides such as Hints to Travellers, published by the RGS c. 1893. The information provided ranged from the essential qualities required in a camera (‘rigidity and strength’) to advice on protecting plates and films against damp and humidity by ‘boxing them in airtight containers containing chloride of calcium which had first been dried on a piece of iron over a fire’.
As photographic technology improved, so it became more widely used by cartographers, botanists, missionaries, geographers, anthropologists, and colonial officials—all in some degree explorers. William Ellis in Madagascar, Prince Roland Bonaparte (1858-1924) in Lapland, Everard im Thurn in British Guiana, Sir J. B. Thurston in Fiji and the Solomon Islands, John Claude White and Auguste François in Tibet, Isabella Bishop (1831-1904)—a rare woman in a male-dominated field—in China, W. H. I. Shakespear (1878-1915) and later Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003) in Arabia, were just a few of those who used the camera to document their travels. Today their images are being re-examined as evidence of how the Victorians and their successors constructed their view of the world and of their position in it.
Of particular interest, not least because of the exceptional difficulties involved, is the record of photography in the polar regions. Although James Cook, in 1773, was the first to enter the Antarctic Circle, it was not until James Clark Ross's circumnavigation expedition of 1839-43 that man actually approached the Antarctic continent. Its doctor and naturalist, Joseph Hooker, noted that ‘no instrument, however newly invented, was omitted, even down to an apparatus for daguerreotyping and talboting’. However, no pictures were actually taken. The first successful polar photographs seem to have been made by John L. Dunmore and George Critcherson in the Arctic North in 1860, and published in William Bradford's book The Arctic Regions in 1873.
It was not until the late 19th century that expeditions to the Antarctic began in earnest, sponsored by nation-states like Germany, the USA, and Norway interested in the continent's economic and scientific possibilities. Photographs from these and other undertakings (for example, the German expedition to observe the 1874 transit of Venus) survive in various national archives. At the same time, photography's educational and publicity value was increasingly appreciated. Sir Clements Markham, who was instrumental in organizing the 1901-4 National British Antarctic Expedition, led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott, understood photographs' fund-raising potential, and encouraged Scott to make an extensive pictorial record. Their images set the standard for future British expeditions, and began a continuing love affair between the British public and Antarctica. But it was Scott's second expedition of 1910-12 that yielded some of the greatest images. These were by Herbert Ponting, the first official photographer on an Antarctic expedition, who made extraordinary, magical pictures despite extreme cold, darkness, and limited facilities. His work was equalled only by that of the intrepid Australian Frank Hurley on Shackleton's 1914-16 Endurance expedition. In December 1911, meanwhile, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen at the South Pole (like Robert Peary at the North Pole in April 1909) had been photographed raising his national flag.
The fact that the North Polar regions were inhabited meant that Arctic photography regularly documented indigenous peoples. For example, J. E. Tenison-Woods's stereographs taken on the voyage of the Fox in 1860-1 show both the landscapes and people of Iceland and Greenland. In the largest body of photographs from the 1870s, taken during the British Arctic Expedition of 1875-6, there are images of the ‘Natives of Disco’ as well as the obligatory bearded Englishmen. From Peary to Knut Rasmussen, from Edward Curtis to modern photographers like Bryan (b. 1949) and Cherry (b. 1949) Alexander, the photograph of the indigenous person goes hand in hand with images of the Arctic ice. Especially in earlier photographs—as in Robert Flaherty's pioneering film documentary Nanook of the North (1922)—the Inuit subject is often constructed as ‘noble savage’ or ‘primitive’ inhabiting a world outside time.
— Joanna Wright
Bibliography
- White, J. C., Tibet and Lhasa (1904).
- Ponting, H., The Great White South (1921).
- Thesiger, W., Visions of a Nomad (1987).
- Keay, J., The Royal Geographical Society History of World Exploration (1991).
- King, J. C. H., and Lidchi, H. (eds.), Imaging the Arctic (1998).
- Murphy, S., South with Endurance (2001)
