It was not glamorous work. It was the kind of work without which none of the rest of the survival was possible.
## The Glass Plates on the Ice
The moment when Frank Hurley smashed his rejected photographs on the ice of the Weddell Sea is one of the most striking episodes in the history of photography, and it is worth dwelling on what it actually involved.
Hurley had been the expedition photographer for more than a year. He had made photographs on the ship during the voyage south, during the entrapment in the pack ice, and through the nine months of the drift. He had hauled his camera equipment into conditions where it should not have functioned — cold temperatures crack lenses and stiffen shutters and ruin emulsions — and made it function through a combination of technical skill and sheer persistence.
Glass-plate negatives are fragile. They are also heavy. Each plate was approximately four inches by five inches of glass coated with a light-sensitive silver-halide emulsion. A collection of 400 plates weighs roughly what its name suggests — four hundred pieces of glass — and it is not portable in the way that a collection of 400 film negatives would be. The plates had to be transported in wooden cases with protective padding, and those cases had to be carried wherever the expedition went.
When Shackleton decided that the weight of the plates was incompatible with the survival imperative — they needed every pound for food and equipment — Hurley did not argue. He understood the arithmetic. He asked for the opportunity to choose which plates to keep, and he was given it. He had to choose approximately 120 images out of more than 400, and then he had to destroy the ones he didn’t choose.