In the photography world’s equivalent of an IMAX event, devotees are about to get a hyperdetailed view of one of exploration’s great survival stories.  Beginning in 1914, the British explorer Ernest Shackleton took the sailing vessel Endurance to the Antarctic as part of an ambitious expedition meant to traverse the continent. The ship became icebound, finally sinking on Nov. 21, 1915, and stranding the ship’s 28 men.  While most of the crew, including the expedition’s official photographer, Frank Hurley, waited on uninhabited Elephant Island off the Antarctic coast, Shackleton and a few of his men made an 800-mile sea voyage in a lifeboat, eventually reaching the South Atlantic’s South Georgia Island. They climbed glacier-topped mountains to reach a whaling station, where Shackleton arranged a rescue of the rest of his crew. The Endurance’s entire crew survived, and Hurley’s photos are a haunting visual account of the ordeal.  Beginning Saturday, London’s Royal Geographical Society, the main repository of Frank Hurley’s glass-plate and Kodak KODK 1.11 % negatives of the journey, will honor the centenary of the Endurance’s sinking with the debut of digital versions of the photos, along with several objects that survived the voyage. “The Enduring Eye: The Antarctic Legacy of Sir Ernest Shackleton and Frank Hurley” ends Feb. 28 and will later tour to other U.K. sites, the U.S. and Canada. The itinerary hasn’t been announced.  The London version of the show includes 97 Hurley photographs along with objects such as a Union Jack presented to Shackleton by King George V and meant to be flown at the South Pole. The flag made its way back with the rescued crew.  Hurley’s images themselves may be familiar, says Alasdair Macleod, head of collections at the Royal Geographical Society, but the clarity of the new prints made by digitally scanning the original negatives means the photographs will have “greater resolution than ever before.” The file sizes of previous digital versions were about 4 megabytes each, while the newly scanned versions are about 1.5 gigabytes.  The exhibit has developed the new digital scans into oversize prints, some more than 8 feet long. “Hurley always intended his images to be several feet across,” says Mr. Macleod.  In addition to revealing previously unseen details of the images—like the names of the books the crew was reading—the new digital versions will be able to show “how the ice looked” at the time, he adds. That could help climate scientists track changes to the continent’s ice cover.  The show opens at a time of strong sales for Shackleton memorabilia. Last month, a travel, science and natural history auction at Christie’s London sold 15 medals presented to Shackleton for a total of about $883,000, far above the presale high estimate of $164,000.
An exhibition in London that will tour to the U.S. presents a photographic record—in extreme detail for the first time—of the ill-fated Shackleton expedition