The heart of the great alone Scott, Shackleton and Antarctic. Photography by David Hempleman- Adams, Sophie Gordon and Emma Stuart (Royal Collection Publications, hardback £29.95, paperback £19.95) (From York Press)

The heart of the great alone Scott, Shackleton and Antarctic. Photography by David Hempleman- Adams, Sophie Gordon and Emma Stuart (Royal Collection Publications, hardback £29.95, paperback £19.95)

2:24pm Wednesday 7th December 2011 in Books By Bill Spence

THIS splendid exhibition catalogue accompanies the first photographic exhibition put on by the Royal Collection which commemorates the centenary of Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole.

All the photographs shown at the Queen’s Gallery are reproduced to a very high standard in this book and here we see the documentation of history and the wonders of nature in the one volume.

Explorers Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley, both professional photographers, took many wonderful images and looking at them in the pages of a book, or indeed a gallery, one can easily forget the conditions in which they brought them back. Large box cameras and photographic plates had to be carried around and set up in temperatures anywhere from -20 to -70 degrees centigrade, and when Shackleton’s ship Endurance was crushed between ice floes, much of Hurley’s equipment was lost and only 120 plates were saved.

While the main subject of the book are the photographs themselves, the text tells us of Scott and Shackleton in the Antarctic, the expeditions, Polar images and royal collecting.

This interesting book has a forward by the Duke of Edinburgh and an introduction by David Hempleman-Adams, the Antarctic explorer who was the first Briton to reach the Pole solo and unsupported.

His personal experience lends insight into the text and helps us see the photographs through an explorer’s eyes.