Naturalistic photography was a movement introduced by P. H. Emerson, primarily through his book, Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art (1889), a polemic against conventionalism in art and photography. Emerson insisted that each picture demanded an original approach based on the direct observation of nature. This derived from contemporary ideas of naturalism in art, discussed in texts such as Francis Bate's ‘The Naturalistic School of Painting’ (The Artist, 1886), and Thomas Goodall's ‘Landscape’ essay in Emerson and Goodall's Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1887). Like Bate, Emerson championed visual devices such as differential focus, peripheral diffusion, subdued tonal values, and the subordination of extraneous detail. These formal elements were intended to correlate a picture—whether painted or photographed—with ‘natural’ human vision, which Emerson validated by selectively quoting Hermann Helmholtz's 1867 text on physiological optics. There were also similarities in subject matter—landscape and rural genre—inspired by painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage, a prime influence on Goodall and Bate and their colleagues in the New English Art Club.
While Emerson saw himself as a lone critic of the photographic status quo, he was extending aesthetic ideas current for over 35 years: formal antecedents can be seen in work by Hill and Adamson and Julia Margaret Cameron, and would later influence pictorialism. Yet Emerson recanted, in ‘The Death of Naturalistic Photography’ (1890). He was partly provoked by George Davidson's lecture ‘Impressionism in Photography’, which recast and updated—but did not credit—Emerson's ideas. Emerson had also concluded that photography could not be a fine art, citing Hurter and Driffield's sensitometric research, which demonstrated that the photographer had little control over tonal values preordained by a standard correlation between exposure and development. He referred to conversations with an artist (probably J. M. Whistler) and research in psychology, which indicated the importance of subjectivity in producing and experiencing art. If art depended on the vagaries of individual perception, it was difficult to substantiate an objective truth to nature, or a mimetic medium such as photography.
— Hope Kingsley
Bibliography
- Turner, P., and Wood, R., P. H. Emerson, Photographer of Norfolk (1974).
- Kemp, W. (ed.), Theorie der Fotografie, i: 1839-1912 (1980)
