Antarctic Image Chronology

William L. Fox

Accessed at least times since 3 December 2006.

This chronology is an annotated guide to the artists and other image makers who have influenced our historical and contemporary visualizations of the Antarctic. It is a work-in-progress that began as part of my research for Terra Antarctica: Looking into the Emptiest Continent, which is in part a history of the scientific, artistic and cartographic images of the continent (currently available in paperback from Shoemaker & Hoard (2007). It continues to be informed by my work on a new book of essays about Antarctic art.

The list includes selected cartographers, writers, filmmakers and others, but emphasis is given to creative artists who have actually visited the Antarctic, especially for those sponsored by the National Science Foundation and parallel agencies in other countries. (The “NSF” designation that appears in parenthesis in the text indicates only that those artists and writers have visited the Antarctic as participants in an NSF program.)

People who are not listed, in general, include the numerous journalists, photojournalists, travel writers, and others visiting the continent who may have documented it, but not advanced our aesthetic perceptions or understanding of it. The year indicates the Austral season during which they were sent. For example, 2001 means the 2001/2002 season, although the person may have actually been there during early 2002. This conforms with how most of the national Antarctic programs list their visiting artists and writers.

My sincere thanks go to the Office of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation, and, the numerous artists, writers, and scientists who have been to the Antarctic and with whom I’ve spoken. Rob Stephensen remains a paragon of generosity for putting this document up on the Antarctic Circle website. In addition, readers familiar with the literature will recognize some of material herein, and a working bibliography is available to anyone interested.

Corrections, additions, and queries should be sent to: wlfox@earthlink.net.

(William L. Fox participated in the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Visiting Artists and Writers Program in 2000-2001, and has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute. He is a recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.)

6th-2nd centuries B.C.
Anaximander of Miletus envisions a circular world as early as 550 B.C.; roughly twenty years later Pythagoras argues that the world is spherical. In the next century Parmenides attempts to calculate the circumference of globe, dividing it into five parallel zones defined by climate, from a frigid north, a temperate band, a torrid equatorial region, another temperate zone, and again a frigid south.

Pytheas of Massilia sails in approximately 330 B.C. from what is now Marseilles, France through the Strait of Gibraltar on a trading voyage to the north, using geometry and his belief that the world was round to calculate his latitude. His account of ice in the Arctic is considered so outlandish that he is ridiculed by most of his contemporaries.

Aristotle, later in the same century, espouses dividing the world into five climate zones and hypothesizes that a great southern land mass is needed to counterbalance those of the known lands in the northern hemisphere (Europe, Asia, and Africa). The northern polar region is named Arktos, Greek for bear and the name of the familiar northern constellation, which gives rise to naming the hypothetical south the “opposite of Arktos,” or Antarktos. The idea of the southern polar region being in opposition to the northern is born.

Eratosthenes in 240 B.C. calculates the circumference of the world to be 25,000 miles, only 140 miles more than the actual polar circumference. During the second century B.C., Crates of Mellos proposes a globe divided into four symmetrical continental areas, two in the northern hemisphere and two in the southern, one of the latter, the Antoikoi, a place populated by Antichthones.


150 A.D.
The Alexandrian scholar Ptolemy agrees with the Greek idea of a symmetrical globe, but postulates that the torrid zone holds fire and monsters, perhaps discouraging exploration. Seeking to rationalize cartographic speculations, he adopts a more conservative estimate of the earth’s circumference from the Greek astronomer Poseidonius. The calculation underestimates the globe’s circumference by 25%, leading Ptolemy to conclude that the Indian Ocean is enclosed to the south by a land mass that he labels Terra Incognita.


Circa 400 A.D.
Ambrosius Theodosius Marcobius (399-422) adopts Crates’s idea of a world with northern and southern land masses divided by an equatorial ocean; his map, first appearing in print in 1483, proposes an Antipodes which is “Frigida” in its southern extremes.


Circa 650 A.D.
According to Cook Island oral histories, the Polynesian chief ‘Ui-te-Rangiora sails into sea ice and icebergs with a double-hulled canoe. The first known images and metaphors to be possibly derived from direct experience within the Antarctic Circle are embedded in the oral history of Rarotonga.


Circa 800 A.D.
Again according to oral traditions, another chief from the Cook Islands, Aru-Tanga-Nuku, repeats his predecessor’s voyage of discovery in a similar vessel.


15th century
World maps based on Ptolemy’s Geographica, published in 1475, show Terra Incognita covering most of the southern hemisphere and linked to Africa. In 1488, however, Diaz reaches the Cape of Good Hope and in 1497 da Gama rounds it, proving that the Indian Ocean is not a closed sea, thus beginning the process of separating from reality the myth of a southern land connected to the known continents. Both of them may have preceded by the Chinese Admiral Cheng-Ho (1405-33), who apparently led more than sixty junks around the Cape.

Late in the century, navigators from the Netherlands and Flanders, seeking to improve their charts, begin to include the first coastal profiles in their rutters (pilot’s sailing books), precursors to the maritime illustrations that will be added routinely to charts and surveys beginning in the next century, at which time the Dutch also develop landscape painting as a distinct genre.


1513
The Ottoman admiral, Piri Reis (b. 1465-70, d. 1554), publishes the first of his two world maps, which contains a controversial outline of a southern continent’s coastline.


1578
Sir Francis Drake sails around Cape Horn, thus proving no southern continent is linked to South America. Cartographers, however, continue to show a massive Terra Australis Incognita covering almost all of the globe south of 50º South, an area five times greater than the actual Antarctic.

Thomas Ellis, a sailor with Frobisher’s third and final probe for the Northwest Passage, sketches four views of an iceberg in 1578.


1693
In recognition of the importance that sketches made by seamen have to exploration, a Drawing School is established at Christ’s Hospital for the training of Royal Navy personnel in making coastal profiles and sea-views.


1699
Edmond Halley, the astronomer and mathematician, on his second voyage south to measure the earth’s magnetic variations and to seek Terra Australis Incognita, enters into his logbook the first known sketch of a tabular iceberg.


1772-1775
Captain James Cook, during his second voyage, circumnavigates the polar region and becomes the first European to cross the Antarctic Circle, which he does four times, reaching as far south as 71º10’ S. This proves conclusively to at least some cartographers that there is no great unknown land connected to either Africa or South America.

Accompanying Cook is William Hodges (1744-1797), a well-known English artist and Cook’s topographical draftsman for the expedition. Hodges had studied with the leading English landscape artist of the time, Richard Wilson, and replaced John Zoffany, a founding member of the Royal Academy who was to have accompanied Cook. They sailed across the Antarctic Circle on January 17th, 1773 shortly before noon, the first people in recorded in European history to do so.

As with many of the expeditions to follow, images are also made by scientists and sailors on the expedition. George Forster, a naturalist, makes watercolors of penguins, for instance, a subject which becomes a staple of Antarctic imagery. He also paints his own “Ice Islands,” perhaps with the help of Hodges, a painting once attributed to the latter.

Joseph Gilbert (1732-1821), the master of the Resolution, also makes images during the voyage, and two seamen on the ship (Henry Roberts and Isaac Smith) draw coastal profiles and harbor views in their logs. At the time, both officers and common seamen being trained in navigation are also being taught elementary drawing in order that their coastal profiles appended to surveys and charts be more accurate. The first major English artist to devote himself to landscape as a subject, Alexander Cozens, actually teaches this course at the Royal Mathematical School of Christ's Hospital from 1750-1754. 

William Wales (1734-1798), one of the two astronomers who served with Cook on the Resolution, becomes master at the Royal Mathematical School upon his return, and Samuel Coleridge is one of his pupils.


1776-1779
Cook makes his third and final voyage, visiting Kerguelen’s Land before leaving Antarctic waters for the last time. John Webber (1752-1798) is the expedition artist who documents the event in watercolors, as well as making coastal panoramas (including three views of “Arched Point”). His illustrations stretch from “ice islands” in Antarctic waters through the tropics and north to Nootka Sound.


1777
A chart by Henry Roberts from the second Cook Expedition is published, A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World.


1798
Samuel Coleridge writes “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” relying on Cook’s accounts for much of his information and imagery, as well as that of Arctic explorers. As Pyne puts it: “Hodges had been content to paint Forster among the ice islands, routinely collecting specimens, and the younger Forster obligingly drew an albatross for the voyage’s scientific record. Coleridge remade the episode into a wanton act that condemned the Mariner to a spiritual hell, and he made the albatross into a symbol of mischosen destiny. Antarctica’s literary potential, as the Ancient Mariner realized, lay in its alienness and inaccessibility. The limit of geographic exploration was equally the limit to rational knowledge.” (Pyne, 162)


1818
John Ross sails to Baffin Bay to explore the possibilities for a Northwest Passage. While there he begins to classify icebergs and make sketches of them, which are later turned to aquatints. His classifications become standard terminology for all manner of sea-borne ice at both poles. He takes with him his nephew, James Clark Ross, who will later become an important Antarctic explorer, surveyor, and artist.


1819-1820
The Russian explorer Bellingshausen, taking his two ships Vostok and Mirnyi south of the Antarctic Circle, sights what was probably the Fimbul Ice Shelf in January 1820. Eventually he is credited with the first sighting of Antarctica. The voyage is recorded by expedition artist Paul Mikhailov, an Academician of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts.

Accompanying Captain John Franklin of the Royal Navy during his first two voyages and overland expeditions in search of a Northwest Passage, first in 1819-1822 and then again in 1825-1827, is Midshipman (and later Admiral Sir) George Back, a prolific and gifted artist. His visual documentations of Arctic exploration are an important body of work in the art of polar exploration.


1820
Henry Foster is with Smith on the Williams, and perhaps the first to make a drawing of the South Shetlands.


1819-1822
James Weddell (1787-1834) makes two sealing voyages in the Jane; William John Huggins (?) makes paintings of (“Weddell’s Ships” at Mitchell Library, NSW—cf. p.90 in RD ). A Voyage Toward the South Pole is published in 1825. Weddell’s account of the voyage, published in 1825, contains sketches and coastal profiles by the author, drawings by A. Masson, and aquatints based on Weddell’s sketches, by J. Clark.

Caspar David Friedrich paints “Shipwreck on the Coast of Greenland” (a painting now lost) in 1822, then “The Sea of Ice” (also called “Arctic Shipwreck”) in 1824. The appearance of the ice for the latter was drawn from the artist’s observations of ice in the Elbe River. The painting becomes a hallmark Romantic image of polar exploration.


1828-1831
Henry Foster sails on the Chanticleer to the Palmer Peninsula, where Lt. Edward N. Kendall surveys Deception Island and makes several paintings of the region. William Henry Bayley Webster, scientist and medical doctor, is the first scientist to work in the Antarctic, preceding James Eights by almost a year.


1829-1831
James Eights (1798-1882), a geologist with the Palmer-Pendleton Expedition, the first U.S. government-sponsored journey, is the first U.S. scientist to visit the Antarctic. Eights discovers the first fossil on the continent, a fragment of carbonized wood, and names pieces of the ice shelf that break off in the ocean “tabular” icebergs. Following his Antarctic voyage he works as an artist and geologist for the Natural History Survey of New York.


1837-1840
The Dumont d’Urville Expedition is no exception in hosting artists. Ernest-Auguste Goupil (1814-1839), a young artist/draftsman, paints scenes in the South Pacific and documents “The corvettes blocked by pack ice” on Feb. 7-8, 1838, but perishes during the trip of dysentery in Hobart on the last day of 1839. D’Urville, surmising the seriousness of Goupil’s condition, makes the decision on December 27th to replace him with the 21-year-old Louis Le Breton (1818-1866), the assistant surgeon on board L’Astrolabe, who had already shown himself to be an accomplished artist during the trip.

Le Breton documents the landing of d’Urville’s crew landing on Adelie Island in January 1840, his sketch serving as the basis for an engraving. Icebergs and ice-laden cliffs surround a dozen crewmen on the rocks, while penguins watch from an ice flow, an image Edward Wilson later remembers as prototypical of Antarctic art. Later in life Le Breton becomes a distinguished maritime artist.

Vincendon-Dumoulin (1811-1858) is the hydrographer for the trip, and completes a stunning aerial-perspective chart Feb. 9, 1838 of the L’Astrolabe’s route through the ice barrier. Later he is the “acclaimed author of a method of surveying coastlines accurately while under sail.”

A painting by A.E.F. Meyer of L’Astrolabe “caught in an ice pack and hauled by the sailors, February 9, 1838,” resides in the Mitchell Library of Sydney, Australia.


1829-1833
Again carrying with him his nephew, James Ross, as one of his lieutenants, John Ross returns to the Arctic on board the first steam powered vessel used in polar exploration. James Ross sledges to the North Magnetic Pole on June 1, 1831.


1838-1842
Charles Wilkes leads the United States Exploring Expedition, taking with him the naturalist and artist Titian Ramsey Peale (1799-1885); Nathaniel Hawthorne applies, but is turned down. Joseph Drayton serves on the Vincennes and Alfred T. Agate on the Peacock as the expedition’s official draftsmen/artists. After conducting coastline sightings for 1500 miles, Wilkes concludes the Antarctic is, indeed, a continent, and his expedition’s published charts are the first to declare the landmass as such.

(William Goetzmann credits the artists on this expedition, in particular Agate, as making the first views of the continent itself. This assertion is strongly parallel to the one that he makes for Peale and the topographical artist Samuel Seymour, who
served as the artists on Stephen Long’s 1819-1820 exploring expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Not only were they the first artists to paint that range, but Goetzmann says that they formulated the first “visualization of the West.” Long’s expedition is best remembered for what it did not find, and its reporting the lands it had traversed to be a “great American desert.”)

Important images of the ships in the pack ice and among icebergs also are made by
Lt. George Emmons (“Peacock in Ice Barrier,” 1840, for example), Passed Midshipman George M. Totten, and Charles Wilkes himself. The expedition leader produces a sketch of a landing party frolicking on an iceberg in 1840, which was later painted in oils by Peale.

Five views of Antarctic headlands are made to accompany the chart of the Antarctic coastline mapped during the voyage, images that presumably were produced with the use of the camera lucida carried on board.

The poem “Thulia: A Tale of the Antarctic” is written by J.C. Palmer about the adventures of the Flying Fish, one of the expedition’s schooners, and is published in 1843 with steel engravings by Agate.

The Smithsonian Institution is later founded to house and study the expedition’s collections, which are so prolific that they continued to yield new species of fish into the 1920s.


1839-1843
The James Clark Ross Expedition takes John Edward (J.E.) Davis as its artist, who is also responsible for “drawing the fair charts from surveys,” and serves as the Assistant Master on the Terror. His watercolors document numerous landings, as well as the taking on board of ice for fresh water, a scene similar to that painted by Hodges during the Cook voyage of 1773. Davis is the first person to paint watercolors of Mt. Erebus, Ross Island, and the Great Ice Barrier. His watercolor “The Erebus and the Terror in sight of Mount Erebus, January 28, 1841” is in the collection of the National Maritime Museum.

John Dalton Hooker (1817-1911), son of Sir Wm. Hooker, was urged upon Ross as a scientist, but there wasn’t provision for any such, so he goes as the assistant surgeon after completing medical exams. He produces six illustrated volumes on polar flora. Ross himself pictures “Part of the South Polar Barrier,” which is later produced as a lithograph by J. Murray.


1845-1846
J.M.W.Turner (1775-1851), who is considered widely to have been the greatest landscape painter in the history of the genre, paints four “Whaling Oils,” which are based on Ross expedition accounts. Two of them were set in the Antarctic (1845), two in the Arctic (1846), based on Thomas Bede’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale . . . to which is added, a Sketch of a South-Sea Whaling Voyage (the first part published in 1835, then again with the Sketch added in 1839).

William Beard, who had photographed Sir John Franklin, Crozier and the officers of Erebus, supplies a daguerreotype apparatus to Franklin’s last expedition.


1850-1854
Lt. S. Gurney Cresswell draws Commander R. McClure’s ship, the Investigator, nipped between two large ice floes as he searches for Franklin, a voyage during which the last link to be discovered in the passage was seen, though not sailed.


1861
Frederic Edwin Church paints “The Icebergs” (currently at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts), and then in 1865 the “Aurora Borealis” (Smithsonian Institution). Although not images of the Antarctic, they become synonymous to the public with polar imagery in general.


1869
The American painter William Bradford, who first painted in the Arctic in 1864, takes the photographers John L. Dunmore and George Critcherson from Black’s Studio in Boston as far north as Melville Bay in Greenland. The subsequent book, The Arctic Regions, contains 141 tipped-in albumen prints, the first photographic record of either polar region to be published. It includes pictures of glaciers, icebergs, and the Arctic sun low over the ice, a technical achievement of no small means.


1872-1876
The voyage of the Challenger, under the direction of expedition leader Charles Wyville Thomson, is the first solely scientific expedition to visit Antarctic waters. Several of its members, including Herbert Swire, Benjamin Shephard, and John James Wild (the official artist), produce sketches and paintings. The first photographs of tabular icebergs are taken in February of 1874.


1878
Gustave Doré illustrates “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and concretizes the definitive and popular image of icebergs as gothic cathedrals, a landscape trope related to von Egglofstein’s treatment of the Grand Canyon, among other historically significant landscape views of the American West.


1892-1893
The Dundee Whaling Expedition produces paintings and colored sketches, among them several by the self-employed commercial artist aboard the Balaena, W.G. Burn Murdoch (1862-1939), of the whalers Active, Balaena, and Diana among towering cliffs of fluted ice. Three penguins in foreground focus the scale. He writes a book, From Edinburgh to the Antarctic: an artist’s notes and sketches during the Dundee Antarctic Expedition of 1892-1893, which is published in London by Longman, Green in 1894.


1897-1898
It is during the Belgian Antarctic Expedition under Adrien Victor Joseph de Gerlache that photography is first used extensively in Antarctica. The photographer, who works in both black-and-white and color, is Dr. Frederick A. Cook of North Pole controversy. By now the tradition of having the artist serve double-duty is well established: Cook also serves as the expedition surgeon and anthropologist.


1898-1900
Carsten Borchgrevink’s British Antarctic Expedition of 1898-1900 is the first group to spend a significant time on the continent, and the first to scale the great ice barrier. The expedition expert on meteorology and magnetism, Tasmanian Louis Bernacchi (1876-1942), has more than 150 photographs of work on the ice or aboard ship published in the expedition account.

Borchgrevink, who notes that de Gerlache’s expedition had failed to set foot on the continent proper, hoists a Union Jack on the Antarctic on March 2, 1899, and Bernacchi photographs the first flag on the continent.


1901-1904
Otto Nordenskjold’s Swedish expedition is captained by Carl Larsen, who does a painting of his ship in a storm. When the Antarctic reaches Buenos Aires on its way to the South Shetlands, Frank W. Stokes, an American artist, joins them. He had accompanied Peary to the Arctic in 1893-1894, and apparently intended to winter over. Stokes self-published a catalog of his Arctic and Antarctic paintings in 1925.

The first extensive land exploration of the continent is made by the British National Antarctic Expedition of 1901-04, which is led by Robert Falcon Scott in the Discovery. Scott becomes the first aeronaut in Antarctic regions, rising in a tethered hydrogen balloon on February 4, 1902 to a height of 800 feet. Scott had anticipated that the Barrier surface would be a level plain, but he observes a series of long undulations running east and west. Later that day, Shackleton ascends and takes the first aerial photographs on the continent.

The science officer and physician for the first Robert Falcon Scott expedition on the Discovery, Dr. Edward A. Wilson (1872-1912), is also an accomplished watercolorist. His paintings of both Antarctic landscapes and wildlife, in particular its birds, establish him early on as the most revered of all expeditionary artists. Almost exclusively under the sway of Turner and Ruskin, factual accuracy is the basis of his aesthetic. While traveling with Scott and Shackleton over the Barrier, he keeps a running sketch portfolio of the mountains forming the horizon, which he later estimates would stretch for over 80 meters if pasted together.

Reginald Skelton (1872-1956), chief enginner aboard the Discovery, serves as the expedition photographer. An exhibition of his photos and Wilson’s work is shown at the Bruton Gallery in late 1904, and some of the photographs are reproduced in Scott’s 2-volume Voyage of the Discovery.


1902-1904
The Scottish National Antarctic Expedition includes a return by the artist W.G. Burn Murdoch.


1903-1905
The first French expedition since d’Urville is under Charcot aboard the Français, and Paul Pleneau, the director of a Paris engineering firm, is the photographer. He brings back several thousand images from the journey.


1907
The Shackleton expedition includes the artist George Edward Marston (1882-1940), as well as James Murray (1865-1914), its biologist who was originally trained in Glasgow as a sculptor. Douglas Mawson, the Australian who will later lead his own expeditions, publishes a science fiction story, “Bathybia,” in Aurora Australis, the first book produced on the ice, which also contains eleven etchings and lithographs by Marston.


1908-1910
Charcot returns to the Antarctic for a second expedition; the subsequent 28-volumes of reports are illustrated with over 3,000 photographs. The photographer, A. Senouque, is also in charge of magnetic studies.


1910-1912
Roald Amundsen sails on board the Fram, an expedition planned originally for the North Pole. Upon hearing that Cook and Peary had reached that goal, he secretly changes his plans to try the South Pole, which he reaches a month before Scott. Lantern slides by Olav Bjaaland and Amundsen are made during the trip.

Edward Wilson returns with Scott on his second expedition, this time aboard the Terra Nova. He perishes with the leader on the return march from the Pole. Although not accorded much status in the art world, which comes to prize aesthetic originality more and more highly as the 20th century progresses, Wilson is widely admired by Antarcticans for his ability to capture accurately the Antarctic landscapes, seascapes, and atmospherics under the most consistently difficult physical conditions ever suffered by an artist. As of early 1999, a small, rare, single watercolor sketch is offered for sale at $12,500.

Herbert Ponting (1870-1935), the first professional photographer to be hired by an Antarctic expedition, is also on board the second expedition, although he does not take part on the trek to the Pole. He produces the first color photographs taken on the continent, autochromes made in 1911; contemporary prints made from his black-and-white glass plates were selling in 1999 for between $260-355, or in an edition of twenty photographs for $5600. He also shoots footage for the first Antarctic film, a classic in exploration cinematography, With Captain Scott to the South Pole (1913).


1911-1914
Douglas Mawson, aboard the Aurora, leads the Australian Expedition, bringing with him the Australian commercial photographer Frank Hurley (1887-1962), Alfred J. Hodgeman (1885-?), a cartographer and sketch artist, and Charles T. Harrisson (1868-?), a 43-year-old “biological collector” and artist. J. van Waterschoot van der Gracht, a marine artist from Hobart who visits during part of the journey, does crayon sketches. P.G. Correll takes color photographs during the final voyage of the expedition. Hurley makes a documentary film of the expedition, The Home of the Blizzard (1913).


1914-1917
Shackleton, on his third expedition aboard Endurance, once again brings Marston with him. Based on his work for Mawson, Shackleton also hires Frank Hurley for his second expedition, this time aboard the Endurance. Hurley’s images become among the most prominent in the history of exploration; as of June 1999, a boxed set of 35 reprints from this expedition were being offered at $10,000 (Australian). Hurley again shoots footage for a film, released in 1919 as South, which was restored in the mid-1990s by the British Film Institute.


1928-1930
During the Wilkins-Hearst expedition, the first Antarctic airplane flight is made on November 16, 1928 by George Hubert Wilkins, a pioneering aviator from Australia who had served with Frank Hurley as a combat photographer. On December 20th, he and his co-pilot Carl Ben Eilson fly thirteen hours and cover 1300 miles, a thousand of which are over new terrain which they sketch and photograph. Although the accuracy of their survey work is severely compromised by the lack of ground control reference points, serious cartographic aerial photography in the Antarctic is launched. Wilkins notes in his diary: “For the first time in history, new land was being discovered from the air.” A photographer, George Rayner, also accompanied the expedition and took a variety of images.

Byrd’s Little America expedition sends Ashley C. McKinley up in an airplane to make aerial photographic surveys. Vander Veer also acts as expedition photographer. Later in 1929, Richard Byrd makes the first flight over the South Pole.

The New York artist David I. Paige (1901-?) is commissioned by the New York Times to supervise the painting of the country’s largest cyclorama, which depicts Little America. The work is completed in 1930 within two months.


1929-1931
Mawson leads the British, Australian, New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE). Frank Hurley makes his last trip to the Antarctic as its photographic artist.


1933-1935
Although Byrd is not interested at first, he eventually agrees to include the painter David Paige as the BAEII artist. Paige produces approximately one hundred pastels from the expedition, most of which are in the archives of the Byrd Polar Research Center. An aerial photographer is also present on the expedition. Byrd decides to overwinter alone at the Bolling Advance Weather Base in the middle of the Ross Ice Shelf, the subject of his book Alone. Paige’s son, a professor at UCLA, proposed to NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that they send a lander to the South Pole of Mars, a plan the agency attempted to achieve, but failed, in late 1999.

Amory Hooper (“Bud”) Waite (1902-1985), a Navy radio operator, is one of three men to rescue Byrd from his five-month experiment in Antarctic solitude. Waite goes on to accompany Byrd on the Highjump and Deep Freeze expeditions, and invents the radio echo sounding technique for measuring the depth of ice. Waite makes a few paintings of the Antarctic, examples of which are held at the BRPC.


1936-1937
The Norwegian whaling magnate, Lars Christensen, leads an expedition aboard the Thorshavn. During almost 31 hours of aerial surveying, members take 2,200 oblique aerial photos covering 6,250 square miles.


1938-1939
During the German expedition under Alfred Ritscher, the first photogrammetry is conducted on the continent starting in December 1938. During seven long-distance flights 1,800 frames of 7”x7” film are taken of approximately 96,500 square miles. Unfortunately, without ground control reference points, the mapping coordinates plotted are inconsistent and anywhere from 60 to 100 miles off the mark. The expedition drops five-foot-long aluminum javelins engraved with swastikas every 18 miles along the flight paths.


1939-1941
The United States Antarctic Service Expedition is led by Byrd, his first to be government funded. Its overt objective is geographical exploration, but its orders include permission for expedition members to claim sovereign rights for America. The painter Leland Curtis (1897-1989) is the expedition artist, and two double-duty photographers also are included, Loran Wells (also a meteorological observer) and Richard Moulton (dog driver). Curtis, who was a mountaineer and a painter of Western landscapes, particularly the Sierra Nevada and Tetons, is featured in a Life magazine article (7/8/1940).

The first color aerial photographic images of the continent are made. Harrison Holt Richardson (1919-1999), a combination dog-team driver and meteorological observer, takes the first Antarctic color film during a survey of the continent’s Pacific coast.


1946-1947, Operation Highjump
During this fourth Byrd expedition, geologists from the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) establish limited ground control using field survey parties. With the introduction of trimetrogon photography, which employs five synchronized cameras, it becomes possible to photo-survey 50,000 square miles in a single six-hour flight. Over 70,000 aerial photographs are taken during this expedition. Byrd claims that the pictures document more of the continent than all of what had been seen of Antarctica during the previous century (roughly a third of the continent), including what members called “the longest unexplored coast in the world, equivalent in distance to the West Coast of the Unites States.


1947-1948, Operation Windmill
A major aerial mapping campaign is carried out during this small expedition, the United States Navy Second Antarctic Developments Project. The number of aerial photographs taken eventually grows so large that it become difficult to keep track of them. By the late 1990s the USGS maintains roughly 450,000 aerial photographic images at the U.S. Antarctic Resource Center (USARC) in Reston, Virginia (formerly the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, or SCAR, Library).

In 1947, the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams is asked to compose music for the film Scott of the Antarctic, a commission he complets in December 1948.


1953
Based on his music for the Scott film, Williams writes his Sinfonia Antarctica (Symphony #7), a piece of just over 40 minutes that premieres in Manchester this year.


1955-1956, Operation Deepfreeze I
Leland Curtis again accompanies Byrd on the American component of the International Geophysical Year (IGY). The US Navy also takes two artists, the civilian Robert Charles Haun (1903-1975) and Commander Standish Backus (1910-1989). The latter went on to become a prominent artist in Santa Barbara and taught at the University of California. Their Antarctic works are held at the Naval Historical Center’s Art Collection and extensive examples can be viewed online at: < http://www.history.navy.mil/branches/nhcorg6.htm>.


July 1, 1957 through December 31, 1958 (IGY)
The earliest date given by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for visiting American artists awarded their sponsorship is for Leland Curtis in this year, when he accompanies Admiral George Dufek for Operation Deep Freeze III.

Edward Seago sails with the Duke of Edinburgh to Antarctica on the Royal Yacht Britannia.

The USGS begins making topographic maps of the continent.


1958
The New Zealand program hosts painter Peter McIntyre, who visits with the assistance of the United States Antarctic Research Program (“ASARP”).


1959
Arthur Beaumont (1890-1978), an American painter of military, historical and other subjects sponsored by the U.S. Navy, sails to the Antarctic as the staff artist attached to the USS Glacier. He completes 350 sketches and 25 paintings while there; some of his work hangs in the Explorers Club in NYC, and an excellent web site with images and his biography has been put up by his grandson, Arthur Beaumont II, at: www.navyart.com.

The renowned Swiss photographer, Emil Schulthess (1913-1996), uses IGY as a way to get to the Ice, spending more than four months there and in 1960 publishes his classic picture book, Antarctica. Schulthess also produced a book on Africa, worked for Life magazine, and was the art director for Swissair—but said that the Antarctic trip was the highlight of his life.

Don Neilson visits from New Zealand with ASARP.


1960
Returning with Operation Deepfreeze 61, Beaumont this time reaches the South Pole and produces the first plein air painting at the South Pole.

Artist Nel Isabel Law (1914-1990) accompanies her husband, Phillip Law, on board the Magga Dan and becomes first Australian woman to set foot on the continent in the process. She paints landscapes in watercolors and oils, as well as abstracts based on her observations.


1961
Kenneth Bertrand (NSF): historian, Americans in Antarctica, 1775-1948 (American Geographical Society, 1971)


1964
The world-renowned Australian painter, Sidney Nolan (1917-1992), makes a visit with the help of U.S. Navy and produces 200 small sketches on cardboard, the basis for a series of more than sixty paintings the following year. He is accompanied by the nonfiction writer Alan Moorehead.


1966
Earthworks pioneer Robert Smithson creates two large photostat works, Proposal for a Monument at Antarctica and Proposal for a Monumnet at Anartica [sic]. The former is a reverse print where the ice appears black and the cubistic crystalline latticework projecting hozizontally out of the ice is traced as white lines. The latter, where the ice is white and the lines black, reveal the collaged elements of early 20th-century explorers on the sea ice juxtaposed withmodern icebreakers. Both works are in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Art. Smith was fascinated by the polar regions, considered linking the Arctic and Antarctic with art, and in 1967 described a spiral sculpture made that year is a New Jersey swamp as an “entropic pole.” Although Lita Albuquerque (see entry for 2006) is an admirer of Smithson’s art, she was unaware of his polar works, which resonates strongly with some of her ideas.


1968
Donald Finkel (NSF): A poet who meets the NSF director of Antarctic programs, Phil Smith, while caving, is invited to visit Antarctica and writes two long narrative poems based on Antarctic history, Adequate Earth (Atheneum, 1972) and Endurance (1978).

The Australian novelist, Thomas Keneally, visits McMurdo and environs, as well as the South Pole, and subsequently writes Victim of the Aurora, the narrator of which is the official artist attached to a fictitious Heroic Age expedition.


1969
Louis J. Halle (NSF): writer, The Sea and the Ice: A Naturalist in Antarctica (Houghton Mifflin, 1973, reprinted Cornell U. Press, 1989).

Charles Neider (-2001) (NSF): Writer, Edge of the World (Doubleday, 1974), Beyond Cape Horn (Sierra Club, 1980). [Also 1970, 1977]. His novel Overflight (1986) is based on his personal experience of crashing in a helicopter on Mt. Erebus. A novella, The Grotto Berg, appeared in 2001.

British painter Keith Shackleton, a distant relative of Sir Ernest, sails aboard the Lindblad Explorer. A book with approximately fifty of his paintings made during journeys to both polar regions, Wildlife and Wilderness: An Artist’s World, was published in 1986.


1970
Neider returns


1971-1972
The Royal New Zealand Air Force Official Artist from 1941-1995, Wing Commander Maurice Conly (1920-1995), visits Scott Base in 1971-72.


1973-1974
Conly returns to visit the Amundsen-Scott station, and produces a book with the writer Neville Peat, Ice on my Palette.


1975
The pioneering landscape photographer, Eliot Porter (1901-1990), makes two trips; the resulting book, Antarctica, is cited more often as a visual influence than any other by artists who have since visited the continent. Porter had been to Iceland in June of 1972, producing a body of work that would prepare him to go south.

The British painter David Smith (?-2000) visits the continent for the first time with the British Antarctic Survey.

Daniel Lang (?-), (NSF): painter


1976
The American artist/writer Peter Plagens paints “The People’s Republic of Antarctica,” an abstract of the continent’s shape.


1977
Neider returns
James Westwater (NSF): Photographer


1979
English painter David Smith returns to the Ice for his second trip. Although he had worked during his first trip primarily in oils, this time he concentrates on watercolors and returns with more than five hundred works. Paintings from both trips are published in The Explorations of Antarctica (1990), co-written with the marine biologist G. E. Fogg.


1981
British novelist Richard Adams (1920-), accompanied by photographer Peter Hirst-Smith, cruises from Tierra del Fuego and down the Peninsula, then over to McMurdo and out to New Zealand on the Linblad Explorer. Adams writes Voyage Through the Antarctic (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982)


1981-1982
The New Zealand artist Austen Deans visits.


1982
A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship award, the historian Stephen Pyne (1949-) (NSF) visits the Antarctic and writes The Ice (University of Iowa Press, 1987; Ballantine, 1988), a project intimately linked to his subsequent book about the cultural history of exploration in the Grand Canyon (How the Canyon Became Grand, Viking, 1998). Like his mentor, William Goetzmann, Pyne traces parallels in the metaphorical exploration of the American West and the Antarctic.

New Zealand photographer Kim Westerkov, who is also a Doctor of Marine Science, begins work at the Scott Base as Information Officer, and is subsequently reemployed for three seasons in the early 1990s. Hundreds of his photographs are included in the Antarctica New Zealand collections.


1983
Australian painter Alasdair McGregor (1954-) goes to Heard Island, the first of five visits through the austral summer of 1997-1998 to the sub-Antarctic islands and the Antarctic continent. He serves as the photographer for the Mawson’s Hut Foundation from 1996-2001.


1984
Michael Parfit (NSF): Writer, South Light (Macmillan, 1986)

Alasdair McGregor returns as an artist with the Australian Antarctic Division..


1985
Jennifer Dewey (NSF): painter, writer, children’s books.

The painter Lucia deLeiris (NSF), co-author of Natural History of the Antarctic Peninsula is based out of McMurdo. She appears in Sara Wheeler’s book, an NSF-sponsored writer with whom she spent some time. [Also 1995]

Sculptor and curator Rachel Weiss is funded by NSF for the exhibition and catalog Imagining Antarctica.


1987
ANARE (Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions) begins its Humanities program sending artists and writers to the ice. Three Australian artists voyage together: John Caldwell (1942-), Bea Maddock (1934-), Jan Senbergs (1939-). A catalog of their subsequent show, Antarctic Journey, is produced in 1988. Senbergs goes on to produce a substantial body of work, Voyage Six--Antarctica.

Sailing in an expedition aboard a private yacht, American photographer Stuart Klipper (1941-) goes to Antarctica for the first time.

Barry Lopez (NSF): Writer, articles in Harper’s, Orion. [Also 1989, 1991, 1992, 1998].


1988
David Barker sails on board the yacht Pelagic from Punta Arenas to Antarctic Peninsula and makes pastels, watercolors, and acrylics. Publishes Antarctica: An Artist’s Logbook in 1991.

Alan Campbell ( NSF): Painter. [Also 1989, 1993].

The English naval painter John Hamilton (1919-deceased?) visits the Falkland Islands on the HMS Endurance, and continues southward for a ten-week tour from South Georgia to the Grahamland Peninsula.


1989
Campbell and Lopez return, as does John Hamilton, who spends three months in the Grahamland Peninsula area. Campbell has a touring exhibition with catalog titled “Antarctica: Images from a Frozen Continent.”

Neelon Crawford (NSF): Photographer. [Also 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994]

Jonathan White (1938-) a traditional painter from New Zealand, works in the Dry Valleys and the historic buildings of the Ross Sea Region.

Photographer Stuart Klipper (NSF) goes for the first time in the NSF program. [Also 1992, 1994, 1999] Among notable bodies of work accomplished on his multiple visits are numerous panoramic shots which extend the tradition of the extended coastal profiles and Wilson’s horizon portfolio. In addition to his Antarctic work being exhibited widely, a limited edition book, Bearing South, is published in 1991.

Traveling under the auspices of ANARE, Clare Robertson (1946-), an Australian painter, visits the Mawson and Davis stations, making sketches in preparation for producing oil-on-canvas paintings the following year for her Extreme Landforms Project.


1990
Elizabeth Arthur (NSF): writer, novel Antarctic Navigation (Knopf, 1995)

Ann Parks Hawthorne (NSF): photographer. [Also 1994, 1996, 2003]

The painter John Hamilton returns for his last visit to the Antarctic under sponsorship of Antarctica New Zealand.
Australian photographer David Neilson is sent by ANARE.


1991
Lopez and Crawford return

Nena Allen (NSF): Painter.

James Gorman (NSF): writer, Ocean Enough and Time (HarperCollins, 1995)

Rebecca Johnson (NSF): writer for young adults (Lerner, titles in 93, 95, 97) [Also 1994, 1997]


1992
Lopez and Crawford return.

Mariana Gosnell (NSF): Writer

Galen Rowell (1940-2002) (NSF): Photographer and writer, Poles Apart (UC Press, 1995). His book compares and contrasts the two polar regions.

Jody Forster (1948-) (NSF): A traditional landscape photographer living in Santa Fe, Forster stays at Palmer Station. [Also 1995]

Australian painter Sally Robinson (1952-) visits the Davis and Mawson stations, and Heald Island.

William Stout (1949-) (NSF): A commercial illustrator and film production designer with many science fiction credits to his name, Stout is the first painter to climb Mt. Erebus. He produces Lost World: Prehistoric and Modern Life in Antarctica.

From the UK, John Hamilton visits.


1993
Campbell and Crawford return.

David Rosenthal (NSF), a painter who lives in Alaska, had first gone to Antarctica as a general field support worker with the contractual support firm, ASA, in 1989. Working in McMurdo and traveling to various scientific camps over four summers and one winter provides him with perhaps the most geographically widespread look at the continent of any artist. [Also 1996, 1999]

A “mockumentary” The Forbidden Quest, written and directed by Peter Delpeut, is released. Utilizing both historical stills and footage of the Arctic and Antarctic, particularly photographs by Hurley and film by Ponting, it is a fictional interview set in Ireland during 1941 with the only surviving member of the Hollandia South Pole Expedition, 1905-06. The goal of the expedition was to discover the hole at the South Pole that led through the center of the earth to the North Pole, and, indeed, the characters discover both a polar bear and Eskimos in the Antarctic. The storyline draws heavily upon Poe, Jules Verne, T.S. Eliot, and numerous explorers of the heroic age, and includes footage of Shackleton’s memorial service.

Australia sends nature artist Catherine Bone, who returns afterwards, although not as a visting artist in the AAD program, for five austral summers to document wildlife.


1994
Crawford, Johnson, and Klipper return.

Sara Wheeler (NSF): Writer, Terra Incognita (Random House, 1996). [Also 1995].

Another American writer, Edward Hoagland, visits the Peninsula on a cruise ship and produces an essay, “I Have Seen the Elephant.”


1995
deLeiris, Forster, and Wheeler return.

Caroline Durre (1955-), an Australian printmaker is sent by AAD.

British author Jenny Diski (1947-) takes a cruise to the Antarctic Peninsula, and two years later publishes her memoir Skating to Antarctica

Peter Nisbet (1949-) (NSF): Painter. Forster and Nisbet team up, seeing themselves as 20th-century counterparts to Thomas Moran and W.H. Jackson in the 19th-century American West. Two of Nisbet’s paintings are used as covers for the first cloth and trade paperback editions of Robinson’s novel.

The noted science fiction novelist, short story writer, and poet Kim Stanley Robinson (1949-) (NSF) visits; upon return he writes the novel Antarctica (Bantam, 1998). Ice is a persistent theme in his fiction, in particular his Mars trilogy.


1996
Ann Parks Hawthorne and Rosenthal return.

James H. Barker (NSF): ethnographer-photographer documented people of Antarctica. [Also 1998].

Macro-photographer Denis Crawford is sent to Davis Station by ANARE.

The American photographer and filmmaker, Rik van Glintenkamp, visits the continent aboard the cruise ship M/S Explorer, exhibiting on board ship his mixed-media collage series about Antarctic explorers, “Echoes in the Ice,” which are also exhibited at SPRI. He begins creating the thirty pieces for the first exhibition in 1989.

Douglas Quin (NSF): Musician, sound recordings of natural sounds, CDs.

Australian painter Alasdair McGregor (1954-) goes as the official artist and photographer of the AAP Mawson Huts Foundation to document restoration work on the station, and returns the following year. His book, Mawson’s Huts: An Antarctic Expedition Journal, is published in 1998.

Sandra Markle (NSF): Children’s writer. [Also 1998]


1997
Johnson returns, as does McGregor.

Australian printmaker Jörg Schmeisser voyages to various stations, and in 2004 the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery opened his exhibition Breaking the Ice (Works from Antarctica 1998-2003). A catalog of the same title is published.

Norbert Wu (NSF): Photographer, underwater in McMurdo Sound. Puts resulting images up on web site.

Gretchen Legler (NSF): Writer. Her book of essays, On the Ice, appears in 2005.

The noted contemporary British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies is based at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera research station in order to compose a symphony to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Sinfonia Antarctica.” The 35-minute “Antarctic Symphony” (Symphony #8) was completed in 2000 and premiered in May of 2001.

New Zealand starts its Artists to Antarctic program by sending down a team. The Auckland painter, Nigel Brown (1949-), and poets Chris Orsman (1955-) and Bill Manhire (1946-, New Zealand poet laureate), make an eight-day trip to visit Scott Base, Taylor Valley, and McMurdo Station. A documentary film crew accompanies them. They produce a small book while there, Homelight, limited to 23 copies.


1998
Barker and Markle return.

Grant Dixon, a Tasmanian photographer, is sent by ANARE.

An Australian writer who lives in England, Meredith Hooper (NSF) goes to Palmer Station to write a children’s book on plankton, Hidden Worlds; she is accompanied by Lucia deLeiris, who does the illustrations (December 21 through mid-March).

Margaret Elliot (1952-), a painter, and Margaret Mahy, children’s author, also visit from New Zealand in December.


1999
Susan Allspaw, a poet, works for ASA and sails out on the Palmer.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe (NSF), children’s writer [also 2003].

Barry Lopez returns on a cruise ship.

Ann Zwinger (1925-) sails to the Antarctic Peninsula on the Explorer.

Stuart Klipper returns late in the year to work on his book for Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gabriel Warren (1955-) (NSF), is the first sculptor sent officially to the Antarctic by the US.

Virginia King (1946-), a New Zealand sculptor and video artist, is sent by her government’s program to Scott Base. The composer Chris Cree Brown also visits and they collaborate on a subsequent exhibition.

The Australian Antarctic Division sends artist Stephen Eastaugh to Casey Station. He starts showing Antarctic works the following year.


2000
The American poet Melinda Mueller publishes What the Ice Gets: Shackleton’s Expedition 1914-1916 (A Poem), using extensive quotes from diaries.

Photographer Sandy Sorlien exhibits Imagining Antarctica, with a published catalog containing e-mails from her brother who was mapping the Antarctic coastline in 1996.

ANZ sends the choreographer Bronwyn Judge, the ceramics artist Raewyn Atkinson, and photographer Craig Potton.


2001
Australia sends Marie Buchner, a photographer and painter, as well as a writer Hazel Edwards, who visits Casey Station. Edwards, a prolific author, subseqently publishes several Antarctic books, among them Antarctica’s Frozen Chosen and Antarctic Writer on Ice.

New Zealand painter Margaret Elliot returns to Scott Base and Windless Bight to teach a University of Canterbury course.

ANZ’s “Antarctic Arts Fellows” also sends the printmaker Denise Copland, abstract painter Richard Thompson, and the noted Wellington photographer Anne Noble (1954-).

William L. Fox (1949-) (NSF), writer, goes to research a book about the history of artistic, cartographic, and scientific images.

Meredith Hooper (NSF) returns with ornithologist William R. Fraser to write a book about Antarctic science.

Henry Kaiser (1952-) (NSF), contemporary improvisor and guitarist from Oakland, CA, is the first musician in the program, and goes to do the first recording of a CD on the Ice (featuring both solo acoustic and electric guitar). He also shoots underwater video for DVD release, and that is later used by German director Werner Herzog in in his feature The Wild Blue Yonder (20025).

Chi Meredith, an Oregon artist who worked as a shipboard scientist in the Antarctic Ocean during the 2000 field season, exhibits a series of “Ocean Views” painted from that trip.

Mary Miller/Exploratorium (NSF), science writer and leader of a team from San Francisco’s Exploratorium.

Book illustrator Sophie Webb (NSF) works on A Guide to the Birds of Chile and the Adjacent Antarctic.


2002
The nonfiction writer Carl Safina (NSF) researches a book on the environment while on the continent.

Intermedia and sound artist Phil Dadson from Auckland is sent by New Zealand. He conducts a performance piece with eight scientists at the face of the Canada Glacier in Taylor Dry Valley, “Echo-Logo,” part of his Polar Projects done while working out of Scott Base.

Australian Stephen Eastaugh returns, this time to Davis Station in the East Antarctic, where he paints, stitches, and draws on everything from blankets to bandages. He also establishes a sculpture garden.

The painter, photographer and writer Jenni Mitchell journeys south with the AAD program and produces an 80-page book To the Ice:Images from the Antarctic.

Kelly Tyler (NSF), who worked on the IMAX film about Shackleton, returns to research a book about the Ross Sea Party of the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-1917).

Bob Marstall (NSF) an artist works on a book for young readers about Weddell seals (written by Laurence Pringle).

Joan Myers (NSF), a noted photographer from Santa Fe, New Mexico works out of McMurdo with journalist Sandra Blakeslee on a book.

A fashion and wearable art designer from Dunedin, Fieke Neuman, is also sent by New Zealand.

Lisa Roberts, a visual artist, is in residence aboard the Australian supply ship Aurora Australis, and produces an interactive CD-Rom, as well as more traditional artworks. This morphs into her website http://antarcticanimation.com/, an ongoing work.

Australia also sends sculptor and environmental artist Maria Buchner (1961-)

Thomas E. Svarney and Patricia Barnes-Svarney (NSF) visit to research a book about Antarctic weather.

Landscape painter James Woodside (NSF) is based at McMurdo.

Norbert Wu (NSF) returns to complete his PBS-TV Nature special, Under Antarctic Ice (2003).

Two landscape artists are sent to Rothera by the newly established Artists and Writers Programme of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Keith Grant and Phillip Hughes.


2003
Jennifer Armstrong (NSF) visits to research a book about ice for young adults.

The writer Christopher Cokinos (NSF) visits to work on a book about meteorites.

Lawrence (“Larry”) J. Conrad (NSF), typonomist and bibliographer, works on an illustrated gazetteer of the McMurdo Sound Region with returning photographer Ann Hawthorne.

John Kelly (1949-) spends three months in the South Orkney Islands with the BAS.

Nin Brudermann, an Austrian artist living in Brooklyn, goes south with the AAD program to make aerial images for her “Balloon in no man’s land” project. The Tasmanian painter Sue Lovegrove is sent and paints abstracts based on patterns in ice.

The French photographer Jean de Pomereu (1962-) works out of Scott Base.

The New Zealand program sendsr realist painter Grahame Sydney (1948), fiction writer and crafts curator Laurence Fearnley (1963-), composer Patrick Shepherd, and photographer Andris Apse. Fearnley’s Antarctic compositions include Fanfare for a Frozen Land and Cryosphere. Fearnley published a novel in 2006, Degrees of Seperation.

Science historian Edward J. Larsen (NSF) works at McMurdo on a history of Antarctic science.

Composer Craig Vear visits Rothera with the BAS.


2004
Internationally-renowned French photographer Yann Arthus Bertrand (NSF) visits to work on the Antarctic section of his Earth from Above book.

Humanities scholar Elena Glasberg (NSF) is sent to research her book End as Beginning: An American Antarctic Imaginary.

Jean de Pomereu returns to visit King George Island and the Antarctic Peninsula.

Jude Nutter (NSF), a painter, is also the third American poet to be sent to the ice after Finkel and Fox.

The well-known editor and writer, Susan Fox Rogers (NSF) visits to work on an anthology of essays by U.S. Antarctic Program participants.

Connie Samaras (NSF) visits the South Pole to photograph a “Vast active living intelligence system.” while Gabrielle Walker (NSF), a British science writer, works at McMurdo to research Antarctica—A Biography of a Continent.

Australian children’s author and illustrator Alison Lester visits.

The British send down the writer Jon McGregor and artist Simon Faithful. The latter produces an illustrated essay as a book, Ice Blink: An Antarctic Essay.

New Zealand Painter/printmaker Dick Frizell (1943-) works out of Scott Base and around the historical buts and buildings of McMurdo. Jeweller Kristen Haydon (1973-) produces a series of Antarctic designs after her visit. Furniture- maker and designer David Trubridge derives a sustainable furniture series from his experience, and a book about the subject, Antarctica and Design. Collaborators Bernadette Hall, a Chirsthcurch poet and playwright, and painter Kathryn Madill voyage south together.

2005
Well-known New Zealand composer Gareth Farr (1968-) visits and works on an orchestral peice to be premiered in 2008. Auckland photographer Megan Jenkinson (1958-) visits.

The BAS sends multimedia artist Layla Curtis (1975-), who spends months producing a GPS-based darwing on her journey from England to Antarctica. The British writer Jean McNeil (1968-) also visits this year, and starts work on Wintering, a novel, and The Antarctic Convergence, a poetry collection.

Australian multimedia artist Judith Parrott spends three months at Casey Station working on an exhibition for the five senses.

The NSF sends Sarah Andrews, a geologist who writes mysterys, for research prepartory to writing In Cold Pursuit. The Georgia painter Alan Campbell returns this time with his son, Colin Campbell, also an artist, the first father-son artist team to visit the ice. The sculptor Gabrielle Warren also returns.

Kathleen Heideman works at McMurdo on a book of poems, The Scientific Method: Poems of Antarctic Inquiry & Research, while Fen Montaigne is at Palmer Station to write The Antarctic Peninsula, Penguins, and a Warming World.

Author Larry Conrad and photographer Anne Hawthorne return to complete fieldwork on their gazetteer of the McMurdo Sound Region.


2006
New Zealand sends a group of three artists to Scott Base. Clare Plug, a contemporary textile artist, works on designs for quilted surfaces in an exhibition, “Layers of Protection.” Sculptor Neil Dawson (1948-) works toward his own show, “Vanishing Point,” while Joyce Campbell, who uses photography, video, and sculpture in her installations, compiles images for her “Lost Light” exhibition.

BAS takes the renowned land artist Chris Drury (1948-) to work on echoes in ice, and the glassmkaer and photographer Anne Brodie, who builds a small glass furnace at Rothera to recycle waste glass into sculpture.

NSF sends photographer George Steinmetz (1957-), who started out with a degree in geophysics, to work on his series of images from an ultralight taken around the world.

Los Angeles artist Lita Albuquerque (1946-) installs the continent’s first large-scale installation work on the Ross Ice Shelf, StellarAxis: Antarctica. Her team includes the returning photographer Jean de Pomereu, the filmmaker Sophie Pegrum, cinematographer Lionel Cousin, and astronomer Simon Balm.

NSF takes the German Werner Herzog (1942-) and Franco-American Anne Aghion filmmakers to work on their separate projects around the Ross Sea Region with various assistants. David Ruth (1951-) is in residence at Palmer Station to take molds in preparation for making glass sculptures. Xavier Cortada (1962) works on a mural at McMurdo and an installation at the geographical South Pole.