The photographic news

• Bandzählung: 35.1891
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1891
• Sprache: Englisch
• Signatur: F 135
• Vorlage: Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig
• Digitalisat: Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig
• Digitalisat: SLUB Dresden
• Rechtehinweis: Public Domain Mark 1.0
• URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:14-db-id1780948042-189100009
• PURL: http://digital.slub-dresden.de/id1780948042-18910000
• OAI: oai:de:slub-dresden:db:id-1780948042-18910000
• Sammlungen: LDP: Historische Bestände der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig
• Sammlungen: Fotografie
• Strukturtyp: Band

• Digitalisat: SLUB Dresden
• Strukturtyp: Ausgabe

October 16, 1891.] THE PHOTOGRAPHIC NEWS. 721 ARCTIC PHOTOGRAPHS. BY JAMES MEW. When John Davis, of Sandridge, some three centuries ago, spoke of Greenland as a “Land very high and full of mightie mountaines, all covered with snowe, and no viewe of wood, grasse, or earth to be seene, with a loth- some shore running a league into the sea, and beset with ice, of which the irksome noyse was such that.it bred strange conceites among us,” he gave a fairly vivid repre sentation of one of those scenes of awful solitude in a region which the photographs taken during the Arctic Expedition in 1878, and presented to the British and Kensington Museums, and three hundred views made by Sergeant Rice in 1881-4, under the command of Lieutenant Greely in his “attainment of the farthest north,” have rendered generally familiar to the photo graphic world. But the language of John Davis, mariner, though graphic and full of energy, cannot compete with the system promoted or called into being by Daguerre, in presenting an exact conception of those long miles of palceocrystic ice-floes which have taken years upon years for their formation ; of those uneven, irregular hummocks, rising like hills above their frozen plains ; of the rubble or loose detritus which abounds on the Arctic highway ; and of the glittering bergs of all conceivable varieties of form, cubical, with regular lines of cleavage, and apparent strati fied structure, conical, pyramidal, amorphous, of which photography has furnished so many illustrations. The “ Musitians ” carried by the Sunshine, the good ship of John Davis, were but a bad substitute for a photographic kit, and the “ white bears of monstrous bigness supposed to be goats or wolves” at Totnes rode under Mount Raleigh, are not so clearly presented to us as the animal “ photographed by Sergeant Rice,” as Mr. Greely puts it in somewhat strange connection, and “skinned by the Eskimo.” In the handbill attached to the display of a popular exhibition in London, we are told that the North West Passage “ bristles with numerous points of interest.” The phrase is happily chosen with regard to the jagged points of ice which surround on every side the explorer of the Arctic seas, but interest—that is to say, sustained human interest —is so notoriously absent from these monotonous realms that the great difficulty in every successive exploration has been to amuse the crew, and to hinder them from falling sick and dead of sheer listlessness and ennui. Had the sailors who accompanied Sir Hugh Willoughby or Martin Frobisher in the middle of the sixteenth century, or those who sailed with Hudson or with Baffin in the beginning of the seventeenth, been acquainted with the resources of what is commonly called at sea the “ cambra,” some pleasurable excitement would surely have been produced ; but even then the “points,” except in the sense above- mentioned, “ of interest ” would have been very far from numerous. The nearest acquaintance of most of us with the polar seas consists in a visit paid to the Bear of the Sea, the so-called polar bear of the “ Zoo.” This miserable beast, a prisoner for life, condemned to dwell, for the gratification of idle curiosity, in an iron-barred cell, some few feet square, with a little dirty, luke-warm water in its midst, can now at best but dream—if white bears dream—of those un fathomable seas and icy halls of cold sublimity in which he was once wont to wander free under the stars of the Frigid Zone. With a fine spirit of satire, worthy of Gibbon or Voltaire, the author of “The Guide Book to the Gardens ” speaks of his narrow prison as “ admirably adapted for the exhibition and comfort of the animal ” : while it explains the weary and ceaseless wandering to and fro of the wretched captive, which must surely touch some sense of pity in the most senseless spectator, as the “ constant motion which he invariably keeps up, indicating the restlessness and energy of his character. ” But habit, it is said, is a second nature, and Ursus Maritimus, Linn. Hab. Polar Regions, has, it may be hoped, become accus tomed to his cramped position, though the “ energy of his character ” seems yet unaltered; as he may also have become used to the Bank Holiday crowds, which have succeeded for him the majestic and everlasting solitude of his original home. It is this solitude, this absence of life, which gives the greatest interest to the pictures of the Pole. Seldom, indeed, can any human influence disturb the lonely grandeur of nature under the Arctic skies. Days of months succeed nights of months, where man is not. Man’s dominion, says Byron, is limited by the sea, but the ocean has now become the world’s high road. It is rather the sea of ice which forbids his further progress, the frozen ocean which makes the regions of the north as silent and as solitary as our own earth once was in that far-back glacial period when man’s existence was unknown. It is the solitude, the absence of life, which gives the greatest interest to Polar pictures; but it is also the cause of their paucity. It is also, the cause of many portraits of harpoon-guns and picks, ladders and anchors, ice-saws and snow-shoes, tents and bedding, sledges and cooking utensils, duffel-bags and bears, lummes and eiderducks, Eskimos in or out of kayaks, and seals. Pictorial records of the Arctic regions have been pro duced by the camera with far greater exactitude—which goes, as the French say, without saying—than the pencil could have drawn them on canvas. The scenery of places within 400 miles of the Pole, a situation defended by ice which cannot, apparently, be passed by man ; ice of every shape and form, mountains of ice girt with storm clouds, huge icebergs with fantastic arches fashioned in some idle freak by the fingers of frost, towering glaciers—all these, the scenery of a land of silence and desolation, may now be studied at will in the summer sunshine, or in some cosy corner in the blaze of our winter fire ; and we may appre ciate them more, if we do not more enjoy them, by a recollection of the hardships and perils attendant upon their execution. Of the many difficulties with which photography has had to contend in the Polar regions, most pathetic accounts have been given by patient and persevering artists; and without these two qualities, without perseverance and patience in a full and heaped-up measure, it is indeed idle to think of taking pictures in the Arctic seas. There is, in the very head and front of photographic offences, the stumbling block of interrupted repose. This rest, so essential to the securing of a good picture, it is almost equally arduous to find on land or sea. The vessel is rarely still, even when the air is calm, but in that condition of the weather known to mariners as “ dirty,” or when the good ship is literally ploughing its path through huge floes which inflict shocks upon it from every side, even the pre liminary arrangement of the fragile stock-in-trade of the photographer is by no means easy. On land—or rather on the masses of ice which pass for terra jirma at the Pole—there is commonly gome degree of agitation, and,