Freeze Frame

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Inglefield's 1854 expedition to the Arctic on HMS Phoenix to provide supplies for the Belcher expedition. Seven Inuit girls and women (West Greenland Inuit dress). ©NMM. : G4262Opened to coincide with International Polar Year, Freeze Framewas a display of some of the earliest photographs of the Arctic, its landscape and people.

The photographs

Inglefield's 1854 expedition to the Arctic on HMS Phoenix to provide supplies for the Belcher expedition. Inuit man with a kayak, with seal hunting gear. ©NMM. : G04267Freeze Frame showcases a selection of prints taken from the Museum’s world-class historic photographs collection. The exhibition will look at two expeditions to the Arctic under Captain Edward Inglefield in 1854, and Captain George Nares in 1875-76. Both expeditions used photographic processes that were in their infancy, having been announced to the public only a few years before. Both processes involved a significant amount of bulky equipment and chemicals in order to develop the negatives. However, the technique used by Nares had a shorter exposure time allowing more photographs of the expedition activities to be recorded.

Inglefield’s photographs were taken in 1854 on the west coast of Greenland, where he stopped during his voyage to communicate with a naval expedition based at Lancaster Sound searching for Sir John Franklin. View Franklin relics discovered by this and other search expeditions (Collections Online).

The photographs were taken using the wet collodion process, first introduced in 1851. They show Inglefield’s ships Phoenix, Diligence and Talbot off the west coast of Greenland, and include striking portraits of the Inuit, Danish and British people he encountered there.

Nares commanded the Polar Expedition of 1875 with HMS Alert and Discovery. The two photographers, one in each ship, used the dry-plate process, which had been first proposed in 1871. The expedition failed in the objective of reaching the Pole due to the ice and the crews suffering from scurvy, however, significant scientific results were achieved. The prints show expedition activities, people and landscape and were published, setting a precedent for later polar expeditions in the 20th century.

Freeze Frame is supported by The Embassy of Denmark.