Passage V

Capturing the Arctic

San Francisco native, Louise Arner Boyd, first saw the blue glaciers and glittering fjords of the Arctic ice cap during a 1924 photography expedition to Spitsbergen, a Norwegian island. In the United States, little was known about the Arctic: its nearly frozen seas, packed with icebergs, made boat travel to the area treacherous. But Boyd, an amateur naturalist and practiced photographer, made exploring this wide, frigid terrain her life’s focus. She would lead seven Arctic expeditions, six by sea and one by air, mainly to the east coast of Greenland.

Boyd’s first two Arctic trips, taken in a small ship with a small crew, were designed for photographing the magnificent glaciers. Soon her interest in the region expanded beyond capturing its beauty. She secured a larger, sturdier ship, the Veslekari, and invited several scientists to travel with her. Over the course of three 1930s voyages, she led her team to the farthest reaches of the Arctic, in 1938, the group anchored close south of the North Pole. Botanists gathered plant specimens from the tundra——paleogeologists studied the ancient ice fields, and hydrogeographers searched for mountains on the ocean floor.

Boyd took thousands of photographs. She worked with the best equipment available, including a tripod-mounted large-format camera that freed crisp, high-resolution images of the landscape. She knew about photogrammetry, the science of making 3-D measurements from photographic images, Boyd used precise methods to choose locations and camera positions for its shots. Her well-executed photos, featured in her book The Fiord Region of East Greenland, provided the basis for the first accurate large-scale maps of the east coast of the country.

The polar expert’s final Arctic journey in 1955 was over the North Pole, in a chartered flight. Her aerial photos document the trip. Today, scientists are exploring how Boyd’s photographs and writing, along with her team’s studies, might be used to monitor environmental change in the Arctic.