Peter Henry Emerson British, b. Cuba, 1856-1936
Trained as a physician, Peter Henry Emerson abandoned medicine soon after receiving his degree in order to take up photography. His thorough command of the medium and his interest in reproducing rural subjects in a simple, direct manner led to an approach that he called naturalism. Emerson argued vehemently that the inherent qualities of photography should be used to portray subjects in a manner that eschewed artifice and the unnatural intrusions of the photographer's aesthetic style. This was in distinction to the academicism that Emerson despised, exemplified by the artificially constructed, often cloying images of Oscar G. Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson.
Emerson's several illustrated volumes of rural British life, beginning with Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886), combined a clarity of vision derived from the advanced science of his day with a retrospective romanticism derived from French and British painting. The result was a unique style that helped direct photography away from artifice toward the visual integrity now associated with modernism and straight photography. Emerson's attempts as a writer and speaker to develop a theoretical base for his style, while highly regarded, are today thought to be a less powerful statement of his opinions than the work he produced. T.W.F.
