Bartalos

L to R: Hurley with Cinematograph, the 'Endurance' icebound, and bosun mending a net. Paget plates by Frank Hurley, 1915.

I’ve long admired of the work of Frank Hurley, the official photographer on Ernest Shackleton’s epic ‘Endurance’ expedition of 1914-17. Hurley’s iconic black-and-white images of this voyage (officially known as the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition) describe a dramatic point of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration and continue to define Antarctica in popular culture today.

So I was pretty excited to find that the State Library of New South Wales recently posted a trove of his lesser-known color photographs from this same expedition, all taken in 1915 before the ‘Endurance’ was lost to the Weddell Sea. Hurley took these images with a short-lived photographic process called Paget, whose colors — though a bit ‘off’ — oddly convey the surreal desolation of the Ice.

See my latest Long View blog post for more about Hurley, his pictures, and the Paget process. A full suite of his color photographs are showcased online at the the State Library of NSW site.