Herbert Ponting: Scott’s Antarctic Photographer and Pioneer Filmmaker

The first biography of Herbert Ponting, a member of both Scott’s and Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions. Herbert Ponting (1870-1935), son of a successful banker, owned one of the first Kodak cameras sold in the UK. By the early 1900s, he had won acclaim for his photography and produced thousands of stereographic images of Asia and Europe. In 1909 Ponting met Scott in London and signed up for the Terra Nova expedition as the group photographer. In February 1913, when Ponting was climbing in Switzerland, the news broke that Scott and his South Pole companions had died. Overnight Ponting’s images became world famous, but when war broke out his offers of serving as a war photographer were declined. However, in 1918 Ponting joined Shackleton on a government backed mission to Spitsbergen, before resuming work on his expedition films, his memoir The Great White South and photographic inventions. Not all his ideas came to fruition, but correspondence with George Eastman (of Kodak), a late-life romance with ‘the Diva’, a circle of close friends, willingness to move with the times and belief in his work kept Ponting going to the end. AUTHOR: Anne Strathie is the author of Birdie Bowers (THP, 2012) and From Ice Floes to Battlefields (THP, 2015). She has attended Antarctic events (Scott and Shackleton) in Britain, Ireland and New Zealand, and has given over fifty talks, including at festivals, local history events and the Royal Geographical Society. 60 colour illustrations