ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up the challenges the Barrier Reef presented to documentary representation for underwater cinema pioneer Frank Hurley, director of the notoriously racist Pearls and Savages (1921), whose prior experience also included photographing Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition. Hurley too faced the limits of human vision and technology, as well as the way the Reef existed across atmospheres of land and air. From the frustrations of the inability to film beneath the sea, however, Hurley rendered the elusive and deceptive power of the ocean’s surface, its “skin.” Focused on one of Frank Hurley’s sea-photographs, I give words to the uncanny power of this threshold zone of tension. At the ocean’s “skin,” flamboyant corals’ partial emergence gave them almost a surrealist existence, in photos where the corals return the viewer’s gaze. Below the watery threshold – which Hurley failed to transcend – lie hazardous, ship-wrecking, and uncanny matters. At the same time, Hurley’s attention is distracted, or abstracted, toward analogy: the ocean’s reefy roof, in the tropical Torres Strait, recalls Antarctic ice-forms.
