Some of the finest of Herbert Ponting’s photographs taken on Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s fateful expedition to the Antarctic are now on display at the Scott Polar Research Institute.

Herbert Ponting travelled with Scott to the Antarctic and took some of the best-known images of the Southern continent ever produced. The photographs capture not only the splendour of the Antarctic environment and the hardships of early exploration, but also the day-to-day life of the expedition and its members and the innovative scientific work that they undertook.

The Herbert Ponting archive comprises a unique collection of over 1,000 original glass-plate negatives of these photographs, stored in the original wooden boxes that Ponting used to carry them back from the expedition.

Professor Julian Dowdeswell, Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, said: “I am delighted that such an important collection, recording so graphically Scott’s last expedition, will now be housed in the Institute under conditions which will ensure its long-term preservation, and displayed in our Museum which is accessible to the whole community. Ponting’s photographs of Antarctica remain among the most evocative images ever taken of the continent. In exhibiting these images in our Polar Museum, we will be able to project not only the huge scale of the Antarctic and its great ice sheet, but also the lives of those who were involved in the early exploration and scientific discoveries about an Antarctic environment that remain important today in the context of climate change in warming world.”

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