Frank Hurley

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Frank Hurley

James Francis Hurley (born October 15, 1885 in Glebe , Australia , † January 16, 1962 in Sydney ), better known as Frank Hurley , was an Australian photographer and cameraman. He became famous through his footage of Ernest Shackleton's second Antarctic expedition and of battlefields of the First World War .

Life

Shackleton's Expedition Endurance

The endurance trapped in the ice .

Hurley's career as a photographer began in 1905 as an electrician in a post office in Sydney. Through this experience he was later able to keep the endurance electrical system running. In 1911 he took part in an expedition of the Australian Antarctic explorer Douglas Mawson .

Ernest Shackleton, an English researcher who had already been to Antarctica with Robert Falcon Scott , saw Hurley's film about the Mawson expedition ("Home of The Blizzard") and hired the photographer to document his own planned trip, namely the crossing of the Antarctic over a distance of 2,900 km. Shackleton's ship "Endurance" did not even reach the Antarctic mainland, but got stuck in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea in January 1915 . One of the most famous photos of the Endurance trapped in the ice was taken by Frank Hurley on a polar night. He used 30 flashes at the same time. In October 1915, the Endurance was crushed by the ice and sank. After two months of bivouacs on ice floes ("Ocean Camp" and "Patience Camp"), which drifted north through the Weddell Sea, all participants of the expedition reached the uninhabited island after the ice floes broke up with the Endurance dinghies Elephant Island . In one of the dinghies, 6 men set out from there on the 1000 km long sea voyage to South Georgia , where there was a whaling station . There Shackleton and two other members of the expedition crossed the insurmountable mountain ranges of the island (height approx. 3000 m) to get to the whaling station. In the course of the rescue operation, which was then organized by Shackleton and which lasted for months, all participants in the expedition were rescued in August 1916.

Hurley was one of those who had waited months for Shackleton's return on Elephant Island in the Weddell Sea, sheltered from the wind and cold under two upturned lifeboats. Among the seafarers he was regarded as a tough, brave man who went about his work even under the most difficult conditions. So he recovered part of his material from the sunken ship by diving into the icy water. On the subsequent walk across the ice, he was forced to limit his photos to a hundred exposed glass plates, which he soldered into metal canisters. " Hurley is a warrior with a camera and would go anywhere or do anything to get a picture, " said the first officer of the "Endurance". He then proved this when, on his return home, he became a war photographer in the theaters of World War I on the Western Front. His pictures are impressive and, despite the horror of the subjects, have an unusually aesthetic appeal. Hurley never made a secret of the fact that he edited some of his pictures, with the result that they were ultimately no longer documentary.

For his spectacular pictures, Hurley achieved prices that had never been charged and paid for similar material before, and turned what was essentially a completely failed expedition into one of the great adventure stories of his time. The expedition film was shown for the first time in 1919 under the title "South", later different versions were shown internationally in lectures or in normal cinema screenings. For this film he even returned to the place of the rescue in late summer 1916 to re-enact Shackleton's departure by rowboat.

War missions

Hurley's photo The morning after the first battle of Passchendaele from 1917 is one of the best-known pictures from the First World War

In 1916, immediately after his rescue, Hurley came to Europe with the rank of captain as a front-line reporter. First he provided the usual photos - group pictures, soldiers in the dugout and the like. Then, under the shock of his own experiences, the motifs changed, showed the bloody reality, the devastated crater landscape of Flanders, tree stumps, ruins, corpses ... He took high personal risks for such images. Here, in the middle of the war, he also undertook his first experiments with color; he got some of the rare color photos from the First World War . However, he often tried to increase the impact of his recordings by using darkroom tricks - and therefore had difficulties with his superiors, who expected pure documents of the war, no staging. Eventually he was transferred to Palestine , to the Ottoman front.

During the Second World War , when Hurley was 55 years old, he returned to the front line, but was turned away several times. He corrected the age information in his passport, and finally he was employed in the Middle East as head of a group of young cameramen. Again there were conflicts because he didn’t want to stop re-enacting battle scenes or changing images afterwards. After six years he returned to Australia disappointed and tired.

Papua New Guinea

Soon after the end of the First World War, Hurley undertook a film expedition to Papua New Guinea , at that time one of the last "blank spots" on the globe for Europe, with great technical effort (airplane, radio, radios) . A scientific advisor should give the company a serious look. In fact, the two adventurers wandered ruthlessly through the villages of the local population, constantly on the hunt for cult objects and other trophies, which they appropriated carelessly. This ended in a public scandal after the authorities in New Guinea became aware in 1923 and Australian newspapers reported the incidents. The scientist took his own life a little later, and Hurley's reputation was also ruined. Nevertheless, his film ("Pearls and Savages") was a considerable success.

Despite the questionable nature of his methods, Hurley left an invaluable cultural and historical document with this film. Because only ten years after his filmic foray, Christian missionaries appeared in the region and converted the local population to give up their ancestral cult and to destroy all evidence of it.

After the wars - Australia

When the Second World War came to an end, Hurley was 61 years old, exhausted, almost destitute and with no career prospects. In the following 15 years, until his death, he photographed his home - the entire continent. He was constantly roaming around producing beautiful pictures of a beautiful country. Poverty, uprooted Aborigines, or farmers suffering from the drought were not included. He showed Australia how it wanted to see itself and how other countries should see it: as an attractive immigration country. His illustrated books and calendars were very successful, and he was soon a wealthy man again.

Frank Hurley died in Sydney on January 16, 1962. He left a wife and three children. Cape Hurley and Mount Hurley in Antarctica are named in his honor .

Work classification

Hurley wasn't interested in mere documentation - he wanted to tell the most exciting stories possible and get famous. He has always succeeded in doing this. Impressive locations alone were not enough for him. He had already upgraded his Antarctic images with technical tricks or daring assignments. For example, he had taken pictures when Shackleton rowed away to get help for the castaways; there were no pictures of the return. So Hurley later used photos of the descent to illustrate the rescue and to round off the story effectively.

Again and again he copied highly dramatic scenes of clouds and light into his recordings, if they seemed too sober to him, as well as planes or the fountains of detonating grenades in the war images. This is how one of the most famous photos of the First World War was created, The Morning After the First Battle of Passchendaele . In Palestine he filmed the great cavalry attack at Be'er Scheva - it was long over, of course, and the actions in Hurley's strips were completely re-enacted. Many of the texts on his film from Papua New Guinea corresponded to the same attitude (for example when he spoke of the sound of the drums as the "call to heat the kettles in which the flesh of the enemy should simmer" ). And during World War II, he had captured enemy tanks shot at to deliver gripping battle scenes.

reception

Hurley's work was almost forgotten for decades. They reappeared in the late 1990s and once again established his fame. Expectations for the documentary value of a photo were no longer too high - every computer contained image processing options that went far beyond Hurley's secret tricks. You saw the pictures as they were and were impressed by their content and their photographic quality. Hurley himself never publicly regretted his manipulations. He thought it was legitimate. His opinion: “A photo is not a document of what you see… Use the camera like a painter uses a brush… The camera is just a piece of technology; You are their brain. "

Filmography (selection)

  • Home of the Blizzard (1913)
  • Into the Unknown (1914)
  • In the Grip of the Polar Ice (1917)
  • South (1919)
  • Pearls and Savages (1921)
  • Jungle Woman (1926)
  • The Hound of the Deep (1926)
  • The Squatter's Daughter (1933)
  • Silence of Dean Maitland (1934)
  • Grandad Rudd (1935)
  • Tall Timbers (1937)

Movie

  • With Shackleton in Antarctica - The photographer Frank Hurley. Documentary by Simon Nasht and Anna Cater, co-production by NDR, BBC a. a., (C) 2004

Web links

Commons : Frank Hurley  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alexander, Caroline: The Endurance Shackleton's legendary expedition to Antarctica, Malik National Geographic, Munich, 2014, p. 92 (paperback edition)
personal data
SURNAME Hurley, Frank
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hurley, James Francis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian photographer and cameraman
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Glebe , Australia
DATE OF DEATH January 16, 1962
Place of death Sydney