Peter Henry Emerson

Peter Henry Emerson (1856–1936) was a Cuban-born photographer. His photographs are early examples of promoting photography as an art form. He is known for taking photographs that displayed natural settings.

Emerson was born in Cuba to a British mother and an American father. He spent most of his youth in New England. He moved to England in 1869 where Emerson was schooled at Cranleigh School, and subsequently attended King's College London, before switching to Clare College, Cambridge, where he earned his medical degree in 1885.^[1] The next year, he abandoned his career as a surgeon and became a photographer and writer. He made many pictures of rural life in the East Anglian fenlands. He published eight books of his work through the next ten years, but did not release anything else after the turn of the century. He died in Falmouth in 1936.

During his life Emerson fought against the British Photographic establishment and the popularity of the tradition of manipulation of many photographs to produce one image, a form that was pioneered by O. G. Reijlander and Henry Peach Robinson. 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, but, in particular, it allowed for the creation of highly dramatic allegorical images. Emerson denounced this as false, and his own pictures were taken in a single shot.

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. This argument about the nature of seein and its representation in photography he pursued vehemently and to the discomfort of the photographic establishment.

Emerson also believed with a passion that photography was an art and not a mechanical reproduction. ON this point as well an argument with the establishment ensued, but Emerson found that his defense 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, Robinson did not publicise his photographic work but still continued to take photographs: a strange ending for a photographer whose pictures endorsed his argument so eloquently.

References

• Peter Henry Emerson. Accessed on March 30, 2005.
• The Life and Work of P. H. Emerson. Accessed on March 30, 2005.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Peter Henry Emerson

• The official National Media Museum print website containing many Peter Henry Emerson prints
• Gallery of Emerson's works
• "Peter Henry Emerson". Photography. Victoria and Albert Museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/photography/photographerframe.php?photographerid=ph021. Retrieved 2007-11-11.