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Lights and shadows Photographs from the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), 1851-1962

From an early original daguerreotype of Arctic explorer Joseph René Bellot to a remarkable aerial image of 1960s Abu Dhabi and iconic photographic ‘firsts’, this exhibition presents an introduction to the Society’s collection of over 500,000 historic images.

Documenting and observing the world through photography has been a focus of the Society’s own work since the 1880s, when John Thomson was appointed as the Society’s official ‘Instructor of Photography’. Thomson referred to the medium as: hey

‘the absolute lights and shadows of all things seen and that are of value in expanding our knowledge of the world in which we live’.

Works featured include images by: Gertrude Bell, Carleton Watkins, Isabella Bird, Sarat Chandra Das and Eric Newby, spanning over a century of documentary photography, with contemporary relevance for research and enquiry. The images are exhibited in chronological order of creation and many illustrate the impact of innovation on photographers as techniques and equipment change and develop through time.

Canadian Arctic

Photograph of Lieutenant Bellow presented by him to Mr John Barrow

Daguerreotype on copper, 1851 (RGS-IBG S0018427)

A daguerreotype on copper and the earliest photographic image in the Society’s Collections. The daguerreotype provided the first commercially available process of creating permanent photographic images.

Joseph René Bellot (1826-1853) was born in Paris. Aged 15 he entered the École Navale at Brest. In 1851 he joined a polar expedition under the command of Captain William Kennedy in search of Sir John Franklin, whose Northwest Passage Expedition on-board the ships Erebus and Terror had been lost in the Canadian Arctic five years earlier. This image was taken in Aberdeen as Bellot was about to embark on the expedition.

A year later Bellot returned for a second attempt, accompanying the Franklin Search Expedition under Captain Edward Inglefield. Whilst trekking amidst floes in the Wellington Channel, Bellot fell through the ice and was lost, his body never recovered.

John Barrow (1808-1898) was the son of Sir John Barrow (1764-1848), one of the founding members of the Society. Barrow, who had followed his father into the Admiralty, was at the heart of Franklin search expeditions until he retired in 1855. Originally forming part of Barrow's personal collection of Arctic artefacts, this framed image was presented to the Society by the Ethnographic Department of the British Museum in March 1938.

United States

Giant Sequoia with Galen Clark

Carleton Watkins (1829 – 1916)

Photograph by Carleton Watkins, 1861 (RGS-IBG S0006115)

Watkins began his career as a photographer during the ‘Gold Rush’, discovering his photographer’s eye whilst temporarily minding a friend’s studio. Made famous by his ‘mammoth’ sized prints – created in the field in 1861 by Watkins using giant glass plate negatives and the correspondingly large cameras required – these iconic images of the American West enabled viewers to understand the grandeur of this pristine landscape for the first time when exhibited in New York at the Goupil Gallery in 1862.

It is thought that Californian Senator John Conness showed his private set of the photographic prints to Abraham Lincoln. The President was so inspired by the images that he decreed Yosemite should be preserved as a natural wilderness, creating the first national park in the United States. Watkins’ life ended in poverty and obscurity, partly as a result of the destruction of his studio and all of its contents during the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and subsequent fire; the two events conspiring to destroy the legacy of his glass plate negatives.

This image is thought to include a rare portrait of Galen Clark, the first European American to discover the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoia trees, and who is notable for his role in gaining legislation to protect it and the Yosemite area, and for 24 years serving as Guardian of Yosemite National Park.

Nepal

Durbar Square and adjacent temples in Patan

Clarence Comyn Taylor (1830 – 1879)

Photograph by Clarence Comyn Taylor, 1862 – 1865 (RGS-IBG S0003074)

Comyn Taylor departed for Asia in 1850 and served in the East India Company army before transferring to the Political Service. He was posted to Kathmandu as Assistant Resident at the time when the Government of India had begun its commission to document the people and monuments of the Indian sub-continent in photographs between 1850 and the early 1880s.

As a keen and talented ‘amateur’ photographer, Comyn Taylor was quickly recruited to document the landscape and people of Nepal. He was responsible for the earliest existing photographs of the country, including those of the temple complex of Pashupatinath, part of a collection of albumen prints.

The process by which the albumen found in egg whites was used to bind the photographic chemicals to the paper was the most common form of photographic positive print from the 1850s through to the start of the twentieth century.

Mexico

Nuns Palace at Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico

Claude Joseph Désiré Charnay (1828 – 1915)

Photograph by Claude Joseph Désiré Charnay, 1870 (RGS-IBG S0022346)

Charnay was a French traveller and archaeologist, notable both for his explorations of Mexico and Central America, and for the pioneering use of photography to document his discoveries.

As a young Frenchman, Charnay travelled to New Orleans where he taught French. He was the first to photograph the Mayan ruins at Mitla, Izamal, Chichen Itza and Uxmal, between 1857 and 1860, whilst travelling on expeditions funded by the French Ministry of Education under Napoleon III. The success of his resulting book Cités et Ruines Américaines, published in Paris in 1863, led him to devote himself to Pre-Columbian Mexican and Mesoamerican archaeology. In 1880-1883 he again visited the ruined cities of Mexico. Pierre Lorillard IV of New York City contributed to defray the expense of this expedition.

Charnay elaborated a theory of Toltec migrations and considered the prehistoric Mexican to be of Asiatic origin, because of supposed observed similarities to Japanese architecture, Chinese decoration, Malaysian language and Cambodian dress. His photographs were the first to document the sites that he encountered.

China

Chinese Bridge, Kwang-tung Province

John Thomson (1837 – 1921)

Photograph by John Thomson, 1872 (RGS-IBG S0022260)

Scottish photographer and travel writer John Thomson set off for Asia in 1862 and over the next ten years he undertook numerous journeys photographing Siam, Cambodia, Vietnam and many areas in China. Thomson was not a government official, nor a missionary. He was a professional photographer who was fascinated by Asia and its people. The photographs of these journeys form one of the most extensive records of any region taken in the 19th century.

The range, depth and aesthetic quality of John Thomson’s photographic vision mark him out as one of the most important travel photographers. The method of taking photographs at that time was the wet-collodion process, so called because an exposure was made onto a glass negative. This had to be done in complete darkness, on location, in a portable darkroom tent. Thomson had to travel with large number of crates, glass negatives and bottles of highly flammable and poisonous chemicals. Given that Thomson’s journeys took him through difficult terrain, it is all the more remarkable that he was able to make photographs of such beauty and sensitivity.

From January 1886, Thomson began instructing explorers at the Royal Geographical Society in the use of photography to document their travels.

Afghanistan

In the Streets of Kandahar

Benjamin Simpson (1831 – 1923)

Photograph by Benjamin Simpson, 1881 (RGS-IBG S0015648)

Sir Benjamin Simpson was a British military surgeon based in India who served in the Indian Medical Service in Bengal from 1853-1890. Following early ‘amateur’ photographic work in Bengal, he was transferred in the 1880s to Afghanistan, where he assumed the role of a war correspondent – arguably the first to be considered as such – during the British occupation of Kandahar. Simpson’s photographs were published under the title From Kandahar by the Bourne Agency in Kolkata.

Simpson’s work was produced in an album format shared with images by John Burke (c.1843-1900) and other photographers whose contributions still remain anonymous but are likely to be the works of a group from the Photograph School of the Bengal Sappers and Miners, trained by the Royal Engineers who recognised the value of photography as a valuable complement to their engineering work. A selection of such images was first publicly exhibited at the Photographic Society of Great Britain exhibition held in London in 1879.

Tibet

A Tibetan Lhacham (Princess)

Sarat Chandra Das (1849 – 1917)

Photograph by Sarat Chandra Das, 1882 (RGS-IBG S0000693)

Chandra Das trained as a civil engineer at Presidency College Kolkata, before taking up the post of Headmaster at Bhutia Boarding School in Darjeeling. There, he taught English, science and cartography and was recruited by the British to travel into Tibet, disguised as a Buddhist monk, in order to carry out land survey and photography as one of the 'Pundits' sent to secretly map and document the region during the period of geopolitical confrontation between Britain and Russia, also known as the ‘Great Game’.

The written accounts of his two journeys were regarded as strictly confidential until they were edited by the Society in 1899 and published in 1902. They contain valuable information on the people and landscape of Tibet at the time.

As a scholar, Chandra Das’s love of Tibet also led to his publication of a thousand-page dictionary of the Tibetan language, whilst he employed his photographs to illustrate his book Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet (1904). In view of his ‘undercover’ role, many of the images taken by Chandra Das represent posed groups and portraits of his subjects as opposed to documentary images.

Myanmar

Burning Forest, Burma

Bertha Ferrars (1845 – c.1930) and Max Henry Ferrars (1846 – 1933)

Photograph by Bertha Ferrars/Max Henry Ferrars, 1890 – 1899 (RGS-IBG S0003780)

The Society holds 467 half-plate glass negatives taken between 1890 and 1900 depicting the people of Burma, now Myanmar, by Max and Bertha Ferrars.

Max Ferrars, after passing the entrance exam for the Imperial East India Forestry Service, served the British Colonial authorities in India for 25 years. He married Bertha Hensler and later appointed himself First Deputy of the Anglo-Oriental Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade. Max and Bertha moved to Freiburg, Germany where he lectured at the university from 1899-1921.

The couple visited Burma during the 1890s. Their photographs were among the first to document the people and landscapes of the country. An illustrated book entitled Burma by Max and Bertha Ferrars was published in 1900 and contained 455 images of Burma along with in-depth descriptions of the Burmese way of life, from marriage, to manners and custom, to handicrafts and painting, to games and sports. The often stylised format of the posed photographs, present their subjects in a ‘picturesque’ form popular with European travellers to the region in the period.

By comparison this photograph provides us with a documentary record of deliberate forest fires created at the time as local resistance against colonial teak production.

Korean Peninsula

Portrait of a Korean Man

Isabella Bird (1831 – 1904)

Photograph by Isabella Bird, 1895 (RGS-IBG S0014881)

Isabella Lucy Bird was one of the most remarkable and high profile travellers of the Victorian age, with a reputation for tenacity and curiosity, whether climbing volcanoes or washing her photographic plates in the waters of the Yangtze River. As a traveller, writer and photographer, the Society recorded in 1904 that "she may be ranked with the most accomplished travellers of her time". Photography became such a passion that when writing to Scott Keltie, the Society’s Secretary, on her return from her 1890s travels to China, Korea and Japan, Bird professed that she had taken over one thousand photographs; a remarkable feat, given the inherent difficulties of transporting her large format, wooden bellows camera, glass plates and developing equipment over vast distances and through difficult terrain, only made possible by teams of local porters.

Taught by John Thomson, the Society’s photographic instructor, Bird’s photographic output coincided with changes in the publishing industry which enabled publishers to reproduce photographs more economically. As her photographic skills bloomed so her later books contained more photographs, to such an extent that her 1899 edition of The Yangtze Valley and Beyond featured over one hundred pictures.

Japan

Mount Fuji

Herbert Ponting (1870 – 1935)

Photograph by Herbert Ponting, 1907 (RGS-IBG S0010741)

Herbert Ponting is internationally recognised as a pioneer of modern polar photography, but his preceding travels as a photographer (and writer) in the Far East are less well known. Ponting's early interest in the stereoscopic technique of photography brought him to the attention of Underwood & Underwood, publishers of stereographic photographs, who commissioned him to travel to Japan.

In 1905, work was completed on Ponting's album Fuji-san, which contained 25 views of Mount Fuji and was first published in Tokyo. The success of this album then led to a companion volume, Japanese Studies, published in Yokohama in 1906, which demonstrated his developing flair for narrative camerawork. Printed using the latest collotype process, each of the 52 images was accompanied by a caption and a poetry extract.

The album was one of the first photographic records of Japanese culture to be made available to a general audience in the West.

Myanmar

Shive Dagon: the Pilgrim's Rest

Vincent Clarence Scott O’Connor (1869 – 1945)

Photograph by Vincent Clarence Scott O’Connor, 1910 (RGS-IBG S0000021)

Scott O’Connor was born in West Bengal, India at the height of the British Raj. He joined the Indian Civil Service in the 1890s, initially as a railway administrator and later holding a series of appointments which allowed him to travel widely, documenting the people and landscapes of Burma, now Myanmar.

O’Connor’s skills went beyond his professional requirements as a civil servant. A travel writer and an accomplished photographer, he brought his travel experiences to audiences in the West, including titles such as Mandalay, and other cities of the Past in Burma, which included over 250 of his photographs, which today provide us with one of the earliest visual records of the region and an opportunity for critical re-evaluation of his subjects.

Antarctica

Grotto in Berg, Terra Nova in distance

Herbert Ponting (1870 – 1935)

Photograph by Herbert Ponting, 1910 – 1913 (RGS-IBG S0000106)

Herbert Ponting was commissioned as the expedition photographer and filmmaker for Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition, 1910-1913, in part based on his extensive experience of photographing China and Japan. Ponting was the first professional photographer to document and record the Antarctic continent. He also taught Scott and other members of the expedition how to take photographs in order that they might record their attempt on the Pole. Well-versed in the art of processing and developing photographs in situ, using state-of-the-art glass plate technology, Ponting had a painstaking approach to selecting his subjects, both in terms of wildlife and also a striking sequence of polar portraits of members from the expedition team.

Perhaps one of the most iconic polar landscape photographs of all time, this striking image was the result of a sequence of preparatory external and internal photographs of the ice cavern, to achieve a remarkable effect.

In the aftermath of the tragic loss of Scott and his party on their return journey from the South Pole, Ponting dedicated his work to the promotion of his photographic images and films of the expedition to public audiences, including With Captain Scott to the South Pole (1913), The Great White Silence (1924) and Ninety Degrees South (1933).

Saudi Arabia

Ibn Saud's army on the march

Captain William Henry Irvine Shakespear (1878 – 1915)

Photograph by Captain William Henry Irvine Shakespear, 1911 (RGS-IBG S0000676)

Shakespear was a British civil servant and explorer who mapped uncharted areas of Northern Arabia and made the first official British contact with Ibn Saud, future ruler of Saudi Arabia. While in Kuwait, Shakespear made seven separate expeditions into the Arabian interior, during which he became a close friend of Ibn Saud, then the Emir of the Nejd. It was Shakespear who arranged for Ibn Sa'ud to be photographed for the first time.

In March 1914, Shakespear began a 2,900-kilometre (1,800 mile) journey from Kuwait to Riyadh and on to Aqaba via the Nafud Desert, which he mapped and studied in great detail; the first European to do so. He was the military adviser to Ibn Saud from 1910 to 1915, when he was shot and killed in the Battle of Jarrab by one of Ibn Rashid's men.

Rapa Nui/Easter Island

Easter Island Statues

Katherine Scoresby Routledge (1886 – 1935)

Photograph by Katherine Scoresby Routledge, 1913 – 1919 (RGS-IBG S0000679)

In 1910, archaeologist and anthropologist Katherine Routledge and her husband William Scoresby Routledge first began to think of travelling to Easter Island and conducting fieldwork there. Both had previously travelled extensively, including two years spent in East Africa. Although earlier European visitors to the islands, including J. Linton Palmer, had commented on – and often drawn or painted – the moai, or statues, by 1910 there had still been no serious scientific study of the famous figures, and to both Katherine and William this presented an opportunity.

Arriving at Easter Island on 29 March 1914, Katherine immediately began preparations for her planned programme of fieldwork.

Throughout the project, she worked closely with Juan Tepano, the headman of Hanga Roa village, who assisted Katherine as interpreter, protector, collaborator and friend. As well as surveying, sketching, and photographing the moai, and the carvings upon them, Katherine also carried out extensive ethnographic interviews with the inhabitants of the island, preserving much of their culture which might otherwise have been lost.

Antarctica

Relaying the James Caird across the ice

Frank Hurley (1885 – 1962)

Photograph by Frank Hurley, 1915 (RGS-IBG S0000837)

Hurley was official photographer and film-maker for Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, (1914-17), better known today as the Endurance expedition.

Shackleton’s ship sank in November of 1915 and the 28 men survived on ice and open ocean before he was able to sail from Elephant Island on the James Caird in April 1916 to raise the alarm at South Georgia. Following his successful voyage across the Southern Ocean, all were saved.

Today, the Society houses the pre-eminent collection of original glass and celluloid negatives, rescued by Hurley and which made the journey home across the ice and open water with Shackleton and his men. The images provide us with a dramatic sense of the expedition but also key information on the ice conditions in the Weddell Sea at that time.

Iraq

Tent of Fahad Bey, Abu Garah

Gertrude Bell (1868 – 1926)

Photograph by Gertrude Bell, 1918 (RGS-IBG S0000523)

Bell made her first visit to the Middle East in 1900 which established the future direction of her studies and led to her experience as one of the first European women to live and work in the Arab World at the start of the twentieth century. At the outset of the First World War, her expertise was much in demand and in early 1915 she was asked to join the British Arab intelligence bureau, arriving in Cairo in November 1915.

At the conclusion of the war, as a British Political Officer, Bell drew up borders within Mesopotamia to include the three Ottoman Empire vilayets (or provinces) that later became Iraq. During her career, Bell frequently used photography as a method of observation to support her mapping and written documentation of architecture and archaeological sites, as well as creating a unique visual record of the people she encountered. Later, Bell began forming what would later become the Baghdad Archaeological Museum. She supervised excavations and examined finds and artefacts, once more using her camera to record site evidence.

She defied the accepted wisdom and insisted that the artefacts should not be transported to Europe but should remain in Iraq. The museum opened in June 1926 shortly before her untimely death.

Canadian Arctic

The 5th Thule Expedition

Knud Rasmussen (1879 – 1933)

Photograph by Knud Rasmussen, 1921-24 (RGS-IBG S0005737)

Rasmussen was a Danish-Inuit explorer and anthropologist. His influential work in studying the people of the High Arctic, their language patterns, migration routes and the unifying characteristics of the indigenous cultures of the Arctic, was to provide the basis for modern research study and enquiry.

In 1910 Rasmussen founded a permanent station in Greenland. Thule was both a trading centre and a base for later expeditions, including his 5th Thule Expedition (1921-24) in which he planned to document every Inuit community from Greenland to the Bering Strait.

Although he lacked formal training as a linguist, Rasmussen’s detailed observations and notes provide a source of primary data for research, and, in the case of the Canadian Inuit, some of the richest material available for study today, along with his maps, charts and photography.

Everest

Team members including Mallory and Sherpas at a rest stop on Everest

Captain John Noel (1890 – 1989)

Photograph by Captain John Noel, 1922 (RGS-IBG S0001176)

Today, it is perhaps the early photographic images of Everest which best capture our imagination and enable us to better understand the shared expertise and human endeavour of those European and Sherpa climbers attempting to reach the summit in the 1920s.

As a method of visual record, the Society had long seen the benefit of the photographic image, but as late as the 1920s it took the skill and passionate encouragement of John Noel, or ‘St Noel of the Cameras’ (as he was fondly nicknamed by the expeditionary team) to convince those senior climbers amongst the 1922 party who viewed the camera with suspicion and saw ‘snaps’ as being a rather vulgar and unnecessary addition to their climb, that the photographic image was an essential method of communicating their activities to the wider world.

In addition to recording the progress of the European climbers, Noel’s images also provide us with some of the first images to document the contribution and role of individual Sherpas without whose knowledge and skill these early expeditions could not have proceeded.

Everest

Mallory and Irvine’s Last Climb

Noel O’Dell (1890 – 1987)

Photograph by Noel O’Dell, 1924 (RGS-IBG S0001208)

Whilst Captain John Noel was the official photographer and film-maker on the 1924 Mount Everest Expedition, jointly organised by the Society and the Alpine Club, London under the auspices of the Mount Everest Committee, other members of the expedition party also took photographs, including Bentley Beetham, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine.

O’Dell was the geologist and mountaineer with specialist responsibility as ‘Oxygen Officer’ on the expedition, during which George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were to perish during their summit attempt. Unlike Noel, who at the time was focused on his cinematography in a different location, it was O’Dell who captured the moment when the two climbers left the North Col for their last climb, with Mallory pictured on the left and Sandy Irvine on the right.

The Kodak camera supplied by the Society to George Mallory specifically to document his attempt to reach the summit of Everest remains lost on the mountain.

Nigeria

House Walls in Kano

Elizabeth Wilhelmina Ness (1881 – 1962)

Photograph by Elizabeth Wilhelmina Ness, 1925 (RGS-IBG S0015699)

Ness was the first woman to become a member of the Society’s Council in 1930. In 1953 she endowed the Society’s Ness Award to be presented

"either to travellers who have successfully carried out their plans, or to encourage travellers who wish to pursue or follow up investigations which have been partially completed".

Amongst her own travels, Ness was the first European woman to cross the Sudan on horseback and the first to cross Lake Kivu in Rwanda on a fleet of canoes.

Ness undertook a journey from Beirut across the Syrian desert to Isfahan, which she described in her book Ten Thousand Miles in Two Continents, published in 1929.

A skilled photographer, documenting all of her journeys in meticulous photographic detail Ness was also one of the first travellers to use 16mm cinematographic film in colour.

Takla Makan Desert, North-western China

Sin Kiang Dunes and Dead Vegetation

Marc Aurel Stein (1862 – 1943)

Photograph by Marc Aurel Stein, 1925 (RGS-IBG S0000557)

Marc Aurel Stein, the Anglo-Hungarian archaeologist, was inspired from an early age by tales of Alexander the Great’s journeys and accounts of Marco Polo’s travels to explore the great deserts of Central Asia, beneath which it was thought, lay the ruins of centuries-old civilisations. In a thirty-year period Stein would uncover evidence of a lost Buddhist civilisation, bringing to light manuscripts, frescoes, paintings, textiles and relics. Stein undertook four major expeditions to central Asia in 1900, 1906-08, 1913-16 and 1930.

His most famous discovery at Dunhuang, also known as the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas was to establish the interconnectivity of ‘The Silk Road’ – named as such by German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen – the routes which had linked China, Central Asia, Persia and the West for thousands of years.

In a lifetime of exploration and archaeology, Stein provided some of the greatest insights into the civilisations which have occupied Central Asia using photography as a key method of record.

Arctic Ocean

In the rigging of the Norge showing flags to be dropped at the Pole

Roald Amundsen (1872-1928)

Photograph by Roald Amundsen, 1926 (RGS-IBG S0012183)

Perhaps best-known as the first human to reach the South Pole in 1911 and to have crossed the North-west Passage in 1903-06, Amundsen set his sights on the first airship flight across the Arctic, working with the Italian designer Umberto Nobile to create and prepare the Norge, his N-Class semi-rigid airship, for polar travel. The expedition also included the U.S. explorer Lincoln Ellsworth.

The Norge was the first aircraft to fly across the polar ice cap between Europe and North America, reaching the North Pole on 12 May 1926, when Norwegian, American and Italian flags were dropped ceremoniously from the airship above the ice.

During those inter-war years, the adaptation of this flight technology for Arctic exploration was front-page news in the international press, accompanied by dramatic images from within the hull of the craft.

Indian Border with Tibet

Summit of Kellas Rock Peak

Anonymous

Photographer unknown, 1935 (RGS-IBG S0011195)

Kellas Peak is situated at the head of a valley, straddling the Indian border with Tibet, bordered by Lhonak peak (6,710m) to the north and Jongsang peak (7,459m) to the south. The mountain had been named by Frank Smythe and members of Professor Günter Oskar Dyrenfurth’s 1930 International Himalayan Expedition in honour of the Scottish explorer and scientist Alexander Mitchell Kellas (1868-1921). Kellas was a pioneering scientist and mountain explorer: between 1907 and 1920 he carried out six expeditions to the high mountains of Sikkim. He died on 5 June 1921, near the village of Kampa Dzong, Tibet, during the early stages of the first Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition organised by the Society and the Alpine Club, London.

Kellas’s contribution to high altitude physiology cannot be underestimated as the first European Himalayan mountaineer to document life above 6,000m. He was one of the first Europeans to recognise the natural mountaineering talents of the Sherpas, and he was almost certainly the first to rely extensively on them as sole climbing companions during numerous extended high altitude explorations and climbs in the Sikkim and Garhwal Himalaya.

Kellas’s own images of the Tibetan plateau dating from 1911 are among the very first to document the landscape of the Himalayas.

Yemen

Wadi Du'an, Yemen

Dame Freya Madeline Stark (1893 – 1993)

Photograph by Dame Freya Madeline Stark, 1935 (RGS-IBG S0000529)

As a travel writer, Freya Stark was one of the first European women to explore the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula and achieved distinction in the 1930s by reaching the hinterland of Southern Arabia. Surpassing the achievements of contemporary male explorers, she also travelled widely in western Iran. She spoke fluent Arabic and Persian, and was also notable for her skills as a cartographer and photographer.

In 1934 she travelled for two months in the Hadhramaut, seeking the ancient city of Shabwa, mentioned by Pliny as a city with sixty temples and capital of the Land of Frankincense. Stark was the first European woman to record an intimate portrait of the people and landscape. In 1937 she began a major archaeological exploration of the Hadhramaut, this time travelling with archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson. Remarking on changes in the landscape since her last visit,

"the towns of the great Wadi, connected by a motor road with the coast and by a weekly aeroplane with Aden, were very different places from what I had known even four years ago on my first visit".

Stark sensed rapid change was a-foot and wanted to capture what she saw on camera.

Southern Ocean

Big seas come aboard, Moshulu, Southern Ocean.

Eric Newby (1919 – 2006)

Photograph by Eric Newby, 1939 (RGS-IBG S0027642)

Eric Newby: author, editor, traveller and photographer, set out from Belfast in 1938 as an apprentice on the four-masted ship Moshulu, as part of what had become known as the 'Grain Race'.

Travelling from Europe to Australia via the Cape of Good Hope, these barques would sail around the world, carrying grain that had been picked up in Australia before returning to their home ports. On the return journey, the ships would race for the fastest time back.

This would be eighteen-year–old Newby’s initiation into an on-board world, providing him with a remarkable opportunity to document crew life and to take a sequence of accomplished photographs which show the challenges faced by the largely Finnish and Swedish crew.

Newby would publish his account, The Last Grain Race in 1956 – his first travel book of over twenty. He went on to become the first Travel Editor at the Observer from 1964-1973, inspiring a new generation of travel broadcasters and writers alike. A camera to hand, Newby continued to document his travels using photography throughout his life.

Everest

Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary drinking tea in the Western Cwm

George Band (1929 – 2011)

Photograph by George Band, 1953 (RGS-IBG S0001063)

George Band, OBE, was the youngest of the mountaineers on the 1953 British Expedition to Mount Everest on which Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made the first known successful ascent of the mountain.

Band photographed the progress of the expedition alongside others, including Alfred Gregory, who was placed in charge of the stills photography, working closely with Tom Stobart the cameraman who filmed the 1953 expedition producing the official film of the event, The Conquest of Everest (1953) and James Morris, the Times newspaper correspondent, whose narrative story of the ascent would be the first read by the public, following his initial encrypted telegram sent from the British Embassy in Kathmandu to his paper which read

“Snow conditions bad STOP advanced base abandoned yesterday STOP awaiting improvement".

Stills film stock, cameras and tripods were provided to the expedition by Agfa, Ilford, Kodak, New York-based LIFE Magazine and the Times newspaper of London. The cameras and equipment were specially ‘winterised’ to cope with the high altitude conditions. In 1953, cameras with auto-focus and exposure control did not exist and so all of the processes had to be carried out manually.

Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi from the Air

Robert Douglas Gordon (1936 – 2017)

Photograph by Robert Douglas Gordon, 1962 (RGS-IBG G166.472)

A Fellow of the Society, Douglas Gordon was a British diplomat, active in the Middle East during the major part of his career. A keen traveller and photographer, his 1960s images of Abu Dhabi and Dubai taken c.1961-3 and donated to the Society by Douglas and Caroline Gordon, provide us with an accurate photographic record of the landscape and vernacular architecture at a pivotal moment in the economic development of the region.

All images featured in this online exhibition can be purchased from the RGS Print Store.

For more information on the Society’s photographic collection and its relationship to our wider holdings of over two million items which provide an unparalleled resource tracing 500 years of geographical discovery please visit our website.

If you are interested in the history of film, in the UK you can visit the British Film Institute website to view the Society’s film collection.

Exhibition curated by Alasdair MacLeod and Jools Cole with Joy Wheeler. Digital Exhibition created by Hania Sosnowska

All images © Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)