Expedition photos reveal raw courage

I recently became the proud owner of a digital camera that has vastly improved the quality of my photos. Even so, my pictures look like crayon drawings compared with the images on display at the Atlas Gallery, near Baker Street in the Marylebone section of London.

“New Worlds: The Photography of Exploration” is a collection of about 300 photographs that document landmark 19th- and 20th-century expeditions to such far-flung places as the summit of Mt. Everest, Antarctica and Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet. These photographs were taken in harsh, exotic environments, often employing cumbersome, technologically unsophisticated instruments, but they record extraordinary moments in humanity’s quest to know the planet.

The 11-year-old gallery, in a Georgian storefront at Dorset and Chiltern streets, grew out of an antiquarian-book dealership that specialized in travel. Atlas now showcases works by a variety of 20th century photographers, including Leni Riefenstahl, Paul Strand and Robert Capa. But gallery director Ben Burdett said travel remains a principal interest, particularly since Atlas began producing limited editions of prints from the 500,000-image photographic archive of the Royal Geographical Society in London.

In the Atlas exhibition are such iconic Geographical Society images as guide Tenzing Norgay standing at the top of the world, a photo taken by Edmund Hillary during the first ascent of Mt. Everest in 1953. Ten prints, which were made from the original and signed by Hillary, were priced at $8,500 each; eight of them were sold during the holidays.

Also available are 30 newly released society images of Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated effort, beginning in 1914, to cross Antarctica. These photos were taken by expedition photographer Frank Hurley and tell the riveting story of how, before a base camp could be established, Shackleton’s ship the Endurance was locked in ice, then broke up, pressed by the hardening ice pack on all sides.

The party was forced to winter on ice floes hundreds of miles short of the South Pole and eventually on stark Elephant Island, at the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. They were stranded there while Shackleton and a handful of companions crossed 850 miles of tempestuous open water in salvaged boats to seek help at a whaling station on the island of South Georgia. Miraculously, four months later, the explorer returned to Elephant Island and rescued his men.

The photos, priced at $48,000 for a limited-edition boxed set, were printed from the photographer’s original glass-plate negatives, which were used before the advent of convenient, lightweight film. Hurley mastered the still arduous art of photography, with all its heavy, complicated gear and risked his life documenting the expedition on numerous occasions, perched in the ship’s rigging or adrift on the ice. He took about 500 pictures but was able to save only about 120 of them.

The first image visitors generally notice when entering the Atlas Gallery is Hurley’s “The Long, Long Night.” It pictures the Endurance in the darkness of midwinter, canted to starboard in its grave of ice, the geometry of its rime-coated rigging dramatically lighted by magnesium flares. Gallery director Burdett said Hurley took great pains to set up such shots. The flares’ bright light made his pupils dilate, blinding him for hours afterward.

Every picture in the show tells its own story of expedition and a photographer’s ability to face exceptional environmental and technological challenges. Interestingly, photography and the Royal Geographical Society, which was founded in 1830 to foster geographical science, grew up at the same time. Pictures became expedition documents, proof of the marvels reported by explorers on their return.

Early on, the Geographical Society encouraged explorers and tourists to take pictures on the road, publishing “Hints to Travelers,” with advice about selecting cameras and keeping photographic plates dry. The booklet included a table of logarithms used for navigational calculation by Capt. Robert Falcon Scott on his 1901-04 expedition to Antarctica.

British photographer Herbert G. Ponting accompanied Scott’s second expedition to Antarctica a decade after the first, resulting in photos of the south polar region of exceptional artistic virtuosity, such as a 1911 portrait of Scott and “Midnight in the Antarctic Summer,” both on display at the gallery. Before Ponting’s exposure to the frozen south, he produced some of the first and finest photos of Mt. Fuji in Japan, several of which are part of the Atlas show.

The show covers two centuries of exploration, from Francis Frith’s photos of Egypt in the 1850s to Apollo 11’s moon landing in 1969.

“None of the photographers -- with the possible exception of Ponting -- thought their work had any intrinsic value,” Burdett said. “They were just taking pictures of events.”

But, to my mind, Hurley’s ghostly images of the Endurance and others in the Atlas exhibition are works of art, engendering wonder at the world and mankind’s ability to capture it photographically, urging us to take better pictures on our travels.

*

‘New Worlds’

What: “New Worlds: The Photography of Exploration”

Where: Atlas Gallery,

49 Dorset St., London; 011-44-20-7224-4192, www.atlasgallery.com

When: Through Jan. 31, although many of the images will continue to be displayed at the gallery thereafter

*

Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at www.latimes.com/susanspano.