FRANK HURLEY: ANTARCTICA AND BEYOND
Marissa Roth is currently curating the first-ever retrospective exhibition about Frank Hurley, the esteemed Australian photographer who was chosen by Sir Ernest Shackleton to photograph onboard during the 1914 Endurance expedition to Antarctica. Hurley’s monolithic images of the ice entrapped ship have become the iconic visual touchstones that mark the close of the Age of Antarctic Exploration. These images have also become the cornerstone images of Hurley's renown.
Soon after the rescue of the crew of the Endurance, Hurley went on to become a war photographer, taking equally powerful images during the Battle of Ypres in World War I. He photographed in Palestine during World War II, and created both ethnographic documentary films and books on Papua New Guinea, and was devoted to photographing his homeland of Australia for the the duration of his career. This retrospective will showcase not only the wide range of his exceptional work, but will include excerpts from his travel diaries.
Roth will travel to many of the locales where Hurley photographed by following in his footsteps as a photographer, in order to get a sense of place as to the experiences that Hurley had, by visually documenting from a contemporary perspective for inclusion in the audio-visual components of the exhibition. Roth is working in conjunction with the Royal Geographical Society in London, and they will debut the retrospective exhibition in 2024.