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Peter Henry Emerson (13 May 1856 – 12 May 1936) was a British writer and photographer. His photographs are early examples of promoting straight photography as an art form. He is known for taking photographs that displayed rural settings and for his disputes with the photographic establishment about the purpose and meaning of photography.


Biography


Early life

Emerson was born on La Palma Estate, a sugar plantation near Encrucijada, Cuba belonging to his American father, Henry Ezekiel Emerson and British mother, Jane, née Harris Billing. He was a distant relative of
Samuel Morse Samuel Finley Breese Morse (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was an American inventor and painter. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph ...
and
Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champ ...
. He spent his early years in Cuba on his father's estate. During the American Civil War he spent some time at
Wilmington, Delaware Wilmington (Lenape: ''Paxahakink /'' ''Pakehakink)'' is the largest city in the U.S. state of Delaware. The city was built on the site of Fort Christina, the first Swedish settlement in North America. It lies at the confluence of the Christina ...
, but moved to England in 1869, after the death of his father. He was schooled at
Cranleigh School Cranleigh School is a public school (English independent day and boarding school) in the village of Cranleigh, Surrey. History It was opened on 29 September 1865 as a boys' school 'to provide a sound and plain education, on the principles o ...
where he was a noted scholar and athlete. He subsequently attended King's College London, before switching to
Clare College, Cambridge Clare College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. The college was founded in 1326 as University Hall, making it the second-oldest surviving college of the University after Peterhouse. It was refound ...
in 1879 where he earned his
medical degree A medical degree is a professional degree admitted to those who have passed coursework in the fields of medicine and/or surgery from an accredited medical school. Obtaining a degree in medicine allows for the recipient to continue on into special ...
in 1885. Emerson was intelligent, well-educated and wealthy with a facility for clearly articulating his many strongly held opinions. In 1881 he married Miss Edith Amy Ainsworth and wrote his first book while on his honeymoon.Peter Turner, 'Emerson, Peter Henry (1856–1936)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
online edition
Oxford University Press, Sept 2004. Retrieved 31 August 2010
The couple eventually had five children.


Photography

He bought his first camera in 1881 or 1882 to be used as a tool on bird-watching trips with his friend, the ornithologist A. T. Evans. In 1885 he was involved in the formation of the Camera Club of London, and the following year he was elected to the Council of the
Photographic Society The Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, commonly known as the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), is one of the world's oldest photographic societies. It was founded in London, England, in 1853 as the Photographic Society of London with ...
and abandoned his career as a surgeon to become a photographer and writer. As well as his particular attraction to nature he was also interested in billiards, rowing and meteorology. Initially influenced by naturalistic French painting, he argued for similarly "naturalistic" photography and took photographs in sharp focus to record country life as clearly as possible. His first album of photographs, published in 1886, was entitled ''Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads'', and it consisted of 40 platinum prints that were informed by these ideas. Before long, however, he became dissatisfied with rendering everything in sharp focus, considering that the undiscriminating emphasis it gave to all objects was unlike the way the human eye saw the world. He then experimented with soft focus, but was unhappy with the results that this gave too, experiencing difficulty with accurately recreating the depth and atmosphere which he saw as necessary to capture nature with precision. Despite his misgivings, he took many photographs of landscapes and rural life in the East Anglian fenlands and published seven further books of his photography through the next ten years. In the last two of these volumes, ''On English Lagoons'' (1893) and ''Marsh Leaves'' (1895), Emerson printed the photographs himself using
photogravure Photogravure (in French ''héliogravure'') is a process for printing photographs, also sometimes used for reproductive intaglio printmaking. It is a photo-mechanical process whereby a copper plate is grained (adding a pattern to the plate) and ...
, after having bad experiences with commercial printers.


20th century

After the publication of ''Marsh Leaves'' in 1895, generally considered to be his best work, Emerson published no further photographs, though he continued writing and publishing books, both works of fiction and on such varied subjects as genealogy and billiards. In 1924, he started writing a history of artistic photography and completed the manuscript just before his death in
Falmouth, Cornwall Falmouth ( ; kw, Aberfala) is a town, civil parish and port on the River Fal on the south coast of Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. It has a total resident population of 21,797 (2011 census). Etymology The name Falmouth is of English or ...
on 12 May 1936. In 1979 he was inducted into the
International Photography Hall of Fame The International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in St. Louis, Missouri honors those who have made great contributions to the field of photography. History In 1977 the first Hall of Fame and Museum opened in Santa Barbara, California and a ...
.


Disagreements with the photographic establishment

During his life Emerson fought against the British photographic establishment on a number of issues. In 1889 he published a controversial and influential book ''Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art'', in which he explained his philosophy of art and straightforward photography. The book was described by one writer as "the bombshell dropped at the tea party" because of the case it made that truthful and realistic photographs would replace contrived photography. This was a direct attack on the popular tradition of combining many photographs to produce one image that had been pioneered by O. G. Reijlander and
Henry Peach Robinson Henry Peach Robinson (9 July 1830, Ludlow, Shropshire – 21 February 1901, Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent) was an English pictorialist photographer best known for his pioneering combination printing - joining multiple negatives or prints to form ...
in the 1850s. Some of Robinson's photographs were of twenty or more separate photographs combined to produce one image. This allowed the production of images that, especially in early days, could not have been produced indoors in low light, and it also made possible the creation of highly dramatic images, often in imitation of allegorical paintings. Emerson denounced this technique as false and claimed that photography should be seen as a genre of its own, not one that seeks to imitate other art forms. All Emerson's own pictures were taken in a single shot and without retouching, which was another form of manipulation that he strongly disagreed with, calling it "the process by which a good, bad, or indifferent photograph is converted into a bad drawing or painting". Emerson also believed that the photograph should be a true representation of that which the eye saw. Following contemporary optical theories, he produced photographs with one area of sharp focus while the remainder was unsharp. He vehemently pursued this argument about the nature of seeing and its representation in photography, to the discomfort of the photographic establishment. Another of Emerson's passionate beliefs was that photography was an art and not a mechanical reproduction. An argument with the establishment ensued on this point as well, but Emerson found that his defence of photography as art failed, and he had to allow that photography was probably a form of mechanical reproduction. The pictures the Robinson school produced may have been "mechanical", but Emerson's may still be considered artistic, since they were not faithful reproductions of a scene but rather having depth as a result of his one-plane-sharp theory. When he lost the argument over the artistic nature of photography, Emerson did not publicize his photographic work but still continued to take photographs.


Publications

* ''Paul Ray at the Hospital: a Picture of Student Life'' (1882, privately published) * ''Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads'' (1886) * ''Pictures from Life in Field and Fen'' (1887) * ''The Compleat Angler, or, The Contemplative Man's Recreation. Being a Discourse of Rivers, Fish-Ponds, Fish, and Fishing'' by Izaak Walton with photogravures by Emerson (1888) * ''Idylls of the Norfolk Broads'' (1888) * ''Pictures of East Anglian Life'' (1888) * ''Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art'' (1889) * ''Wild Life on a Tidal Water'' (1890) * ''On English Lagoons'' (1893) * ''Birds, Beasts and Fishes of the Norfolk Broadland'' (1895) * ''Marsh Leaves'' (1895) * ''Caóba, the Guerilla Chief. A Real Romance of the Cuban Rebellion'' (1897) * ''The English Emersons, a genealogical historical sketch to the end of the 17th century'' (1898) * ''Suggested Amended Billiard Rules for Amateur Players'' (1908)


References


Further reading

* Turner, Peter, and Richard Wood. ''P.H. Emerson: photographer of Norfolk''. Boston: D. R. Godine; London: Gordon Fraser, 1974. * Newhall, Nancy Wynne. ''P.H. Emerson: the fight for photography as a fine art''. New York: Aperture, 1975. * McWilliam, Neil, Veronica Sekules, and Michael Brandon-Jones. ''Life and landscape: P.H. Emerson: art & photography in East Anglia, 1885–1900''. Norwich: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 1986. * Handy, Ellen, Brian Lukacher, and Shelley Rice. ''Pictorial effect naturalistic vision: the photographs and theories of Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson''. Norfolk, VA: Chrysler Museum, 1994. * Maynard, Patrick. ''The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography'', ch. XI. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997. * Taylor, John. ''The old order and the new: P.H. Emerson and photography, 1885–1895''. Munich and New York: Prestel, 2006. * Peterson, Christian A. ''Peter Henry Emerson and American naturalistic photography''. Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008. * Ewing, Samuel. 2015. "The Courbet of England: Peter Henry Emerson’s East Anglian Photographs and the Imperial Ordering of Labour." ''History Of Photography'' 39, no. 1: 18-32. * Fuldner, Carl
"Emerson's Evolution"
''Tate Papers'', no. 27, Spring 2017.


External links

* Fuller, John
Peter Henry Emerson. (British, 1856–1936).
From Grove Art Online via
Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...
. Oxford University Press, 2009. *
George Eastman House The George Eastman Museum, also referred to as ''George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film'', the world's oldest museum dedicated to photography and one of the world's oldest film archives, opened to the public in 1949 in ...

Peter Henry Emerson Still Photograph Archive
with many images. * * * * Science & Society Picture Library
Peter Henry Emerson
containing many images from the
National Media Museum The National Science and Media Museum (formerly The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, 1983–2006 and then the National Media Museum, 2006–2017), located in Bradford, West Yorkshire, is part of the national Science Museum G ...
and the Royal Photographic Society. * Stringer, Jon
The Life and Work of Dr. P. H. Emerson

Encyclopædia Britannica
{{DEFAULTSORT:Emerson, Peter Henry 1856 births 1936 deaths People educated at Cranleigh School Alumni of King's College London Alumni of Clare College, Cambridge Photographers from London People from Sagua la Grande People from Pinar del Río Province Irish folklorists