Herbert Ponting: Scott's Antarctic Photographer and Pioneer Filmmaker

Anne Strathie, MA 1970

Herbert Ponting (1870-1935) was a young bank clerk when he bought an early Kodak compact camera. By the early 1900s, he was living in California, working as a professional photographer, known for stereoview and striking enlarged photographs of America, Japan and the Russo-Japanese war.

In 1909, back in Britain, Ponting was recruited by Captain Robert Scott as photographer and filmmaker for his second Antarctic expedition. In 1913, following the deaths of Scott and his South Pole party companions, Ponting’s images of Antarctica were published worldwide and he developed innovative ‘cinema-lectures’ on the expedition, which were given all over Britain, in America and in Paris.

When World War I broke out, Ponting’s offers to serve as a photographer or war correspondent were declined, but in 1918 he, Ernest Shackleton and other Antarctic veterans joined a government-backed expedition to Spitsbergen.

During the economically depressed 1920s and 1930s, Ponting wrote his Antarctic memoirs, re-worked his Antarctic films into silent and ‘talkie’ versions and worked on inventions. Like others, he struggled financially but was sustained by correspondence with photographic equipment magnate George Eastman, a late-life romance with singer Glae Carrodus, and knowing that his images of Antarctica had secured his place in photographic and filmmaking history.

This new biography of Ponting includes newly uncovered images and information; over 100 illustrations (full colour printing).

ISBN: 9780750979016