n the ice-imprisoned ship, Hurley faces new problems: “Darkroom work rendered extremely difficult by the low temperatures it being -13°C outside.” The temperature in the darkroom, near the engine room, is just above freezing. “Washing [plates] is troublesome as the tank must be kept warm or the plates become an enclosure in an ice block.... Development is a source of annoyance to the fingers which split & crack around the nails in a painful manner.”

He remarks about the “difficulty in obtaining sufficient water for washing operations”—not noting the obvious reason for the difficulty: He gets water by melting blocks of ice.

Frank Hurley considered his color photos “amongst the most valuable records of the expedition.” He was an early user of a method of color photography called the Paget process, which was introduced commercially little more than a year before the Endurance sailed.

To make a color photo using the Paget process, Hurley exposed a negative plate through a color screen plate scored with a pattern of dots and lines. He then made a transparency positive by contact-printing the negative. The transparency was then bound to a color screen whose pattern matched that of the screen used in the original exposure. The process was eclipsed by autochrome and later by Kodachrome.

c o n t i n u e . . .