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GeorgeLowe

  • Camera
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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.

Screenography

Aspiring
2006 Subject Television
Beyond Everest
2000 Subject Television
Holmes - Hillary's Trek: Everest
1991 Subject Television
Antarctic Crossing
1958 Director, Camera Film

Awards

1998 Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit
'For Services to New Zealand Interests in the United Kingdom'

1958 Academy Awards
Nominated for Best Documentary Feature: Antarctic Crossing

“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)