The Unfinished Photographs

The Kodak film should have been developed by February 1898. When it reached John Hertzberg's laboratory in Stockholm, it was 1930. Some of the rolls were wet to their wooden cores. The photographic coating had softened until a touch could lift it from the celluloid underneath.

Hertzberg had very little expectation of finding pictures. He knew that an undeveloped image could weaken with age, especially after a short exposure. The film base could also deteriorate and fog the sensitive coating. Cold might have helped these rolls survive, but they had spent years in containers partly filled with water.

They were the photographic remains of Salomon August Andrée's attempt to cross the North Pole by balloon. Andrée, the engineer Knut Frænkel and their young photographer, Nils Strindberg, had disappeared in 1897. The discovery of their last camp on Kvitøya, or White Island, in the Svalbard archipelago brought back notebooks, instruments and human remains. The film presented a different problem from the diaries: its record had never become visible.

A camera for the air, taken onto the ice

The expedition had left Danskön, off north-western Spitsbergen, on 11 July 1897. Andrée hoped to carry scientific observations across an enormous area that could not readily be surveyed from the ground. Photography belonged to that ambition. Strindberg's special camera could take ordinary views or accept a board carrying two lenses for stereoscopic photographs, whose paired viewpoints could give an impression of depth.

The apparatus was substantial. A photograph taken at the base camp places Strindberg behind a wooden camera on a tripod, one hand on its top and the other beside the lens. The tent and mountains behind him establish the working ground from which the balloon party would depart. He was twenty-four when they set out.

The expedition carried enough large-format roll film for more than a thousand exposures.

The main stock came in rolls intended for forty-eight pictures, each about thirteen by eighteen centimetres. A roll was more than eight metres long. It wound around a wooden spool without protective paper between its layers, so changing it required a light-tight bag. Flexible film saved the party from carrying a separate sheet of glass for every exposure, but it remained a vulnerable physical load.

On 14 July, after less than three days, Örnen came down on the pack ice. The journey towards the Pole became an attempt to reach land with sledges and a canvas boat. Strindberg continued photographing as the men reorganised their equipment and began hauling it across ridges and channels in the moving ice.

One surviving view places all three men around the loaded boat at a pressure ridge. Frænkel is on the left, Andrée on the right and Strindberg between them. Their presence together required the camera to work without a photographer standing behind it; the museum identifies an automatic release as the likely explanation. It is an arranged record of the work, rather than a passing observer's lucky snapshot.

Photography competed with repairs, cooking, observations and the effort of dragging the sledges. The camera also had a domestic use. On 1 August, Andrée listed the party's seats at meals: a medicine chest, a camera and a box of matches.

Two days later they arranged a small exhibition of their own ingenuity. Andrée recorded photographing the development of their forks, and making a fork for Frænkel. Three implements were set against a dark backing above the side of the boat: two recognisable table forks and a narrow improvised one with a looped handle. A bundled figure stood beyond them.

That day Andrée complained of heat in the tent. They decided to eat outside and hauled without coats. The ice, he wrote, was dreadful. The photograph belongs to that mixture of discomfort, repair and ordinary occupation. The new fork received its own place in the record.

What reached the laboratory

The men eventually reached White Island and died there. The surviving papers do not establish a complete account of their last days. Their camp remained undiscovered until August 1930, when the Norwegian vessel Bratvaag visited the island during a sealing and scientific voyage.

Two sealers, Olav Salen and Karl Tusvik, were looking for drinking water when they noticed an aluminium lid. Beyond it, a dark object protruding from snow proved to be the canvas boat. The party recovered remains and equipment; another vessel, Isbjørn, later brought back more material as the snow exposed it. The photographs and notebooks came from successive searches of a scattered camp.

Before the film reached Stockholm, an engineer named Köhler emptied loose water from its containers in Tromsø. Hertzberg believed this had prevented further damage as the rolls travelled into warmer conditions. In the laboratory he numbered and weighed the containers, then began separating film from spool.

His inventory included nine containers of tinned iron and seven of copper, a loose roll wrapped in black and red cloth, and a roll-film cassette. Examining the winding showed that some film had never entered a camera. Four of the copper-container rolls were exposed; three were not. The cassette held another partly exposed roll.

The unused material was valuable. It had aged in the same expedition, yet Hertzberg could experiment on it without sacrificing a picture. He cautiously unrolled and dried the wet stock, separating the softened coating from the back of the next turn. Only then could he work out how to develop it.

Making the image stronger also risked making the fog stronger.

Hertzberg tried several developers. The best produced a yellow-brown image as well as the silver image. The stain was faint to the eye, but it absorbed blue and violet light strongly. By copying onto photographic material sensitive to those colours, he could turn weak differences in the original into a more usable positive. Further copying strengthened the result again.

He developed the film piece by piece, with uneven results. In his report, signed in November 1930, he counted about fifty areas carrying more or less distinct image traces. About twenty seemed clear enough to produce reproducible pictures after further treatment. The larger figure of ninety-three images familiar from later scholarship describes a different assessment of the surviving material; it should not be read as Hertzberg's count of clear photographs.

The roll in the cassette was worse. Found in an open holder, it had been exposed to weather and light, soaked, then partly dried into a solid rod. Hertzberg sawed off the hardened ends so that he could unroll the still-damp middle. Some images remained in the inner turns.

Copies of a difficult original

The pictures that entered books were the outcome of development, copying, enlargement and retouching. Hertzberg thanked Hasselblad's photographic company for materials and technical assistance, and the reproduction firm preparing the illustrations for its retouching work. He also made an unretouched set of prints, preserved at the museum in Gränna.

Decades later, photographer and researcher Tyrone Martinsson returned to the original negatives. Working with conservator Lennart Andersson, he encountered the same softness when making analogue copies through the glass protecting the fragile film. Scanning the originals produced sharper results. In an interview, Martinsson recalled realising that the pictures themselves had not all been out of focus: copying had concealed detail that the film still contained.