Peter Henry Emerson
Encyclopedia
Peter Henry Emerson was a British
writer and photographer. His photographs are early examples of promoting photography as an art form. He is known for taking photographs that displayed natural
settings and for his disputes with the photographic establishment about the purpose and meaning of photography.
belonging to his American father, Henry Ezekiel Emerson and British mother, Jane, née Harris Billing. He was a distant relative of Samuel Morse and Ralph Waldo Emerson
. He spent his early years in Cuba on his father's estate. During the American Civil War he spent some time at Wilmington, Delaware
, but moved to England in 1869, after the death of his father. He was schooled at Cranleigh School
where he was a noted scholar and athlete. He subsequently attended King's College London
, before switching to Clare College, Cambridge
in 1879 where he earned his medical degree
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. The couple eventually had five children.
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
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 Anglia
n 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
, after having bad experiences with commercial printers.
on 12 May 1936.
In 1979 he was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame.
to produce one image that had been pioneered by O. G. Reijlander
and Henry Peach Robinson
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 publicise his photographic work but still continued to take photographs.
A partial list of Emerson's many published works follows:
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
writer and photographer. His photographs are early examples of promoting photography as an art form. He is known for taking photographs that displayed natural
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
settings and for his disputes with the photographic establishment about the purpose and meaning of photography.
Early life
Emerson was born on La Palma Estate, a sugar plantation near Encrucijada, CubaEncrucijada, Cuba
Encrucijada is a municipality and city in the Villa Clara Province of Cuba.It was founded in 1850 and established as a municipality in 1910.-Demographics:...
belonging to his American father, Henry Ezekiel Emerson and British mother, Jane, née Harris Billing. He was a distant relative of Samuel Morse and Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
. 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, Delaware
Wilmington is the largest city in the state of Delaware, United States, and is located at the confluence of the Christina River and Brandywine Creek, near where the Christina flows into the Delaware River. It is the county seat of New Castle County and one of the major cities in the Delaware Valley...
, but moved to England in 1869, after the death of his father. He was schooled at Cranleigh School
Cranleigh School
Cranleigh School is an independent English boarding school in the village of Cranleigh, Surrey. It was founded in 1865 as a boys' school and started to admit girls in the early 1970s. It is now co-educational. The current headmaster is Guy de W...
where he was a noted scholar and athlete. He subsequently attended King's College London
King's College London
King's College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. King's has a claim to being the third oldest university in England, having been founded by King George IV and the Duke of Wellington in 1829, and...
, before switching to Clare College, Cambridge
Clare College, Cambridge
Clare College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England.The college was founded in 1326, making it the second-oldest surviving college of the University after Peterhouse. Clare is famous for its chapel choir and for its gardens on "the Backs"...
in 1879 where he earned his medical degree
Doctor of Medicine
Doctor of Medicine is a doctoral degree for physicians. The degree is granted by medical schools...
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. 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
Royal Photographic Society
The Royal Photographic Society is the world's oldest national photographic society. It was founded in London, United Kingdom in 1853 as The Photographic Society of London with the objective of promoting the Art and Science of Photography...
and abandoned his career as a surgeon
Surgery
Surgery is an ancient medical specialty that uses operative manual and instrumental techniques on a patient to investigate and/or treat a pathological condition such as disease or injury, or to help improve bodily function or appearance.An act of performing surgery may be called a surgical...
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 Anglia
East Anglia
East Anglia is a traditional name for a region of eastern England, named after an ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the Kingdom of the East Angles. The Angles took their name from their homeland Angeln, in northern Germany. East Anglia initially consisted of Norfolk and Suffolk, but upon the marriage of...
n 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
Photogravure is an intaglio printmaking or photo-mechanical process whereby a copper plate is coated with a light-sensitive gelatin tissue which had been exposed to a film positive, and then etched, resulting in a high quality intaglio print that can reproduce the detail and continuous tones of a...
, 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, CornwallFalmouth, Cornwall
Falmouth 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 21,635.Falmouth is the terminus of the A39, which begins some 200 miles away in Bath, Somerset....
on 12 May 1936.
In 1979 he was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame.
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 photographsCombination printing
Combination printing is the technique of using two or more photographic images in conjunction with one another to create a single image.Combination printing was popular in the mid-19th century due to the limitations of the negative's light sensitivity and camera technology...
to produce one image that had been pioneered by O. G. Reijlander
Oscar Gustave Rejlander
Oscar Gustave Rejlander was a pioneering Victorian art photographer and an expert in photomontage...
and Henry Peach Robinson
Henry Peach Robinson
Henry Peach Robinson was an English pictorialist photographer best known for his pioneering combination printing - joining multiple negatives to form a single image, the precursor to photomontage...
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 publicise his photographic work but still continued to take photographs.
Publications
]A partial list of Emerson's many published works follows:
- 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 WaltonIzaak WaltonIzaak Walton was an English writer. Best known as the author of The Compleat Angler, he also wrote a number of short biographies which have been collected under the title of Walton's Lives.-Biography:...
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)
Further reading
- Turner, Peter, and Richard Wood. P.H. Emerson: photographer of Norfolk. Boston: D. R. Godine; London: Gordon Fraser, 1974. ISBN 0879231068
- Newhall, Nancy Wynne. P.H. Emerson: the fight for photography as a fine art. New York: Aperture, 1975. ISBN 0912334584
- 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. ISBN 0946009104
- 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. ISBN 094074466X
- Maynard, Patrick. The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography, ch. XI. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8014-8689-0
- Taylor, John. The old order and the new: P.H. Emerson and photography, 1885-1895. Munich and New York: Prestel, 2006. ISBN 3791336991
- Peterson, Christian A. Peter Henry Emerson and American naturalistic photography. Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008. ISBN 9780912964980
External links
- Fuller, John. Peter Henry Emerson. (British, 1856-1936). From Grove Art Online via Museum of Modern ArtMuseum of Modern ArtThe Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
. Oxford University Press, 2009. - George Eastman HouseGeorge Eastman HouseThe George Eastman House is the world's oldest museum dedicated to photography and one of the world's oldest film archives, opened to the public in 1949 in Rochester, New York, USA. World-renowned for its photograph and motion picture archives, the museum is also a leader in film preservation and...
. Peter Henry Emerson Still Photograph Archive with many images. - Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
. Search results for creator = "Emerson, P. H. (Peter Henry), 1856-1936" with many full-text publications. - Science & Society Picture Library. Peter Henry Emerson containing many images from the National Media Museum and the Royal Photographic SocietyRoyal Photographic SocietyThe Royal Photographic Society is the world's oldest national photographic society. It was founded in London, United Kingdom in 1853 as The Photographic Society of London with the objective of promoting the Art and Science of Photography...
. - Stringer, Jon. The Life and Work of Dr. P. H. Emerson.