Jane Ussher

Jane Ussher on going freelance in Antarctica

Ispent Christmas of 2008 in Antarctica. It coincided with leaving the New Zealand Listener, where I had been chief photographer for more than 25 years. And I bought my first digital, Hasselblad camera. What I proposed to do in the Antarctic would have been impossible with a film camera. I needed to be able to see what I was photographing immediately. So I ditched the square-format camera I had been passionate about for so long. The chance to get on to the ice and do the job properly was a good incentive.

When you work for the same company for 25 years, they become your family. So leaving and becoming a freelancer was a huge break. There are stresses that go along with that, but it had become quite repetitive and I was looking for new challenges.

Going to the Antarctic was perfect. It took me out of my comfort zone of portraiture.

And it took me deep inside three historic huts. Before I’d even left the first hut at Cape Evans I was confident I had a really strong body of work. Fortunately, Murdoch Books saw they could get a substantial book out of it, which became Still Life.

It wasn’t a bad first go at being a freelancer.

For me it meant people could see I was capable of more than being a portrait photographer. I needed to step away from that. I wanted to learn new techniques and how to create different sorts of images.

Everything worked in my favour. I got there by convincing people I was the only person to do this — that the way I was going to document the huts was a way no one else could. I believed it — but in hindsight I don’t know what gave me that confidence.

And once I got the green light there was a huge amount of anxiety. I’d oversold, so I had to over-deliver.

I was dealing with the Government and the Antarctic Heritage Trust. That was a lot of responsibility because normally to go down there you have to go on an artists’ programme.

When you’re there you’re expected to work every hour. You can sleep but the expectation is that because it’s costing so much per day, you have to come up with results.

I went with a huge amount of anxiety but also with confidence in the techniques I was going to use, which hadn’t been used in the huts. I did three- to four-minute exposures, bouncing light around the huts, which required two assistants. I took lots of “slices” of the interiors and stitched them together. If you look at the images, you will see things you wouldn’t see with the naked eye in an hour inside the hut.

The Hasselblad was the perfect choice. It works well in low light and I don’t like photographing in bright light.

In the end, I think it gave me a lot of confidence that I’d achieved something beyond what I’d been doing at The Listener. I thought: if I can do this away from the magazine, I can probably set myself lots of other goals and achieve them.

As told to Paul Little

HILLARY’S ANTARCTICA, TEXT BY NIGEL WATSON, PHOTOGRAPHY BY JANE USSHER (ALLEN & UNWIN, $50) IS AVAILABLE NOW.