I spent most of yesterday processing panoramic photographs on my laptop including this one of the interior of Frank Hurley's Darkroom - a very small room about 1.5m x 1.5m x 2m high. As you can imagine, this presents a significant challenge to anyone attempting photo documentation - sure, it is entirely feasible to photograph specific objects in there (if you lean in from the outside to avoid trampling artifacts on the floor), but to actually photograph a substantial portion of the interior is very challenging - but not impossible.
The picture above represents a 360ºx180º texture map of the entire interior of the darkroom - it's a bit like a Mercatorial map projection - a longitudinal rectangular image with polar distortions such that if it were wrapped around an imaginary sphere everything would appear from the correct perspective. This is exactly what happens with cubic or spherical QTVR (QuickTime Virtual Reality) projections - with the geometry being distorted again for cubic projection - so that a viewer in the centre of the cube sees everything as if it were surrounding them in normal Cartesian space.
This type of image distortion has a long history - tracing its way back to the vogue for distorted imagery that could be seen in "correcting" mirrors (such as cylinders) in anamorphic images painted during the 16th to 18th centuries - and in such paintings as Holbein's (1497–1543) "The Ambassadors" - with the famous image of the stretched skull that can only be seen correctly if the painting is viewed side- on at an extremely oblique angle: a philosophical memento mori encoded in the image.
This image of Hurley's Darkroom is a composite of 95 photographs - each of 8 megapixels - rendered via computer software into a longitudinal texture map 10183 pixels wide by 5091pixels high - and this is at only 50% resolution! What this means is that the image is not only scalable for a standard computer screen, but is of sufficiently high resolution that it can be displayed upon a large scale projection device (such as a planetarium dome or, even better, a perpendicular dome such as the iDome produced by iCinema and my colleague Paul Bourke at WASP) allowing the viewer to interactively revolve the image and to zoom in and analyse whatever part attracts their interest.
In this, then, we see the beginnings of an effective virtual archaeology and materials conservation visualisation device - meaning that specialists could make heritage conservation decisions without actually having to be there - bringing more minds to bear upon issues without the requirement to ship them all the way to, in this case, Antarctica. Similarly, it affords interesting new ways for scholars of history and the general public to access sites and situations that they might otherwise never have access to - all without disturbing the original site. The camera itself used to create the image sits upon a tripod within the scene with minimal impact - as you can see in this image it has entirely disappeared and the point of view seems to float in empty space in the middle of the darkroom!
I can't help but thinking that Hurley would have been an enthusiastic adopter of this technology himself - I believe he would have been thrilled with the possibilities of digital imaging. My stereoscopic movie "Home of the Blizzard" - which is on permanent display in the 3D theatrette at the 'Islands to Ice Exhibition' at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart - explores many of his stereoscopic images, which bring the 'third dimension' of depth perception to an image (just like an IMAX movie that you see with those funny 3D glasses on). I took a few stereoscopic shots of the interior of the darkroom - but this represents a real challenge for an array of other technical reasons.
However, in both the spherical panorama and the stereoscopic images I have taken I am pleased to say that there is one characteristic they share in common with Hurley's images - level of detail. I have been able, via high resolution scanning and image processing, to reveal aspects of the 1911-14 AAE captured in Hurley's images that have not been seen for nearly 100 years - if, in fact, ever - because they have always been looked at as 'photographic images' to be printed. They aren't - they're data that now be explored via new techniques of computer visualisation - revealing intimate detail (such as the titles of the books expeditioners were reading) that has not really been examined. Similarly, in this image of Hurley's Darkroom, there is much to discover - I have pored over it for hours and it is quite astonishing what you find - what you would never find just casually standing there in the darkness. It enables a kind of forensic approach to looking at a site (so, like a crime scene investigation) and in this gathering of clues a wealth of knowledge is revealed, not only about Mr Hurley's darkroom, the chemicals he used, the workflow he followed, the signs of labour from a century ago; but also the interruptions of time - the decay and moisture in the walls, the interventions of other people over time and, no doubt, much more for other eyes to find.
In this then, we can approach the entire photographic record of the hut as a remarkable database of artefactual movements, human intervention and spatio-temporal "sampling." Errol Morris, the masterful American documentary filmmaker expressed the value of a photograph most wonderfully in a recent series of articles for the New York Times, regarding two images of the Crimean War taken by Roger Fention: "Photographs provide a "window" into history. Not into general history – but into a specific moment, a specific place. It is as if we have reached into the past and created a tiny peephole."
Having read the logbooks about site visits kept at the Sørensen Hut, it is now apparent that here were a variety of visits by the French and others during the 1950's and 1960's - a surprising array of notes were left in the Magnetic Hut, which had been used for observations and shelter. So, for instance, we know that Mssrs Lachaux, Larbilliere, Vieillame and Dourmap, led by Paul Emile Victor of the Expedition Polaire Française, visited in January 1951(or is it 1959?...) Did they take photographs? It would be hard to believe that they didn't and it would be wonderful to track them down - a mystery surprisingly similar to Morris' wonderful forensic journey with the Fenton images (I'd certainly recommend reading "Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg? (Part One)" by Errol Morris, in 'Zoom' the New York Times Blog (24/10/07).) Due to the scarcity of these visits, I imagine it would be, to some degree, possible to reconstruct the "afterlife" of the Cape Denison site and Mawson's Huts and track how things have changed and moved over time.
This tracking would enable the investigator to filter out the perceived "noise" of post-AAE interventions and open that peephole into the real, 'authentic' residue of the AAE - the scatter of artefacts left as they were, the true signs of life as they were left. In a sense this type of historical veracity is always intractable, always unknowable, but that is the nature of the past: we struggle to understand it through interpretation, through the concatenation of things left behind, traces of lives lived and intentions formed and acted out, and through this, I hope, we come to better understand the present.
- Peter Morse
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