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George Lowe

Adventurer, Cameraman

Wallace George Lowe got interested in cameras as a child in Hastings. As a climber he was pivotal in helping his mate Hillary summit Everest, and he filmed the mission after the official photographer got pneumonia. The Lowe-directed doco The Conquest of Everest, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1954; the film he directed on the first trans-Antarctic crossing was also Oscar-nominated. Lowe died on 20 March 2013.

This Antarctic autumn was the answer to a colour photographer's prayer, with orange suns jerking and sizzling through strange mirages, golden snow beneath clouds of every conceivable colour — and the moon always in view, switching on like a lighthouse when dusk fell. Lowe, on filming during Vivian Fuchs' pioneering trans-Antarctic expedition (in his 1959 book, Because it is There)