Herbert Ponting, the official "camera artist" of the 1910-12 Scott Expedition, struggled to address the relative lack of classical perspective of horizon and scale.

The human-scale figures and the "sublime" icescapes only become meaningful in relation to one another. Elena Glasberg says in the Blankness in the Antarctic Landscape of An-My Lê:

Without human figures, the unfamiliar environment would escape the particularity of place. This paradox of encounter, which fueled the Heroic Age, between an indifferent ice and humans intent on colonizing the uninhabitable, recurs throughout Antarctic photographic representation. It has left deep traces of style, object choice, and perspective on Antarctic representational history, not the least of which is the powerful imperial imaginary of Antarctica as a tabula rasa, or a pristine, untouched, terrain that, as the translation "blank slate" would suggest, invited marking.

Glasberg says that:

For Ponting, the inviting blankness of Antarctica seemed almost formalist, an aesthetic challenge to create a recognizable scape from such impoverished materials. That his photos were part of an imperial expedition to claim Antarctica and the South Pole underscores the role of cultural concepts in the construction of empire. Ponting's landscapes were more than attempts to fill in the blank of Antarctica with familiar gestures to romantic sublimity: they were claims on the territory created by the camera's eye as much as by the juridical intentions of the British.