Biography (Courtesy of Christian Peterson)
 
A major nineteenth-century British photographer, P. H. Emerson spearheaded naturalistic photography at home and abroad. He extensively photographed and wrote about the landscape and inhabitants of his country’s southeastern coastline. Most of his exquisite images were issued as photogravures, in limited-edition books and portfolios.
 
Peter Henry Emerson (a distant relative of the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson) was born on May 13, 1856, on the sugar plantation of his American father in La Palma, Cuba, then a colony of Spain. Sports and the outdoors were early interests of the young boy. When he was eight, his family moved back to the United States for a brief time, before settling in his mother’s native land of England, after his father died. He studied medicine at King’s College in London and received the equivalent of an M. D. in 1879. Shortly thereafter, he took an advanced medical degree and then worked as a physician for a few years.
 
In 1882, Emerson began to photograph and exhibit his work. The next year, he joined the Photographic Society of Great Britain, later renamed the Royal Photographic Society, with which he became closely associated. In the 1880s, his work was included in exhibitions in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Philadelphia. In 1885, he cruised for the first time through the Norfolk Broads, a region that captivated him for many years. Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, his deluxe book of forty platinum prints, appeared the next year, to great praise.
 
Emerson’s subsequent publications, however, all were illustrated with images in photogravure, a high-quality photomechanical process. Between 1887 and 1895, Emerson issued two portfolios and five additional books, beginning with Idyls of the Norfolk Broads and ending with March Leaves. He functioned like an artistic anthropologist, making beautiful idyllic images accompanied by substantial and insightful text on the lifestyles of his subjects. In 1890, Emerson himself learned the photogravure process, setting up his own press and making the prints for his subsequent publications.
 
Emerson defined naturalistic photography in 1889, when he issued his unillustrated tract Naturalistic Photograph for Students of the Art. In it, he argued for photography as a fine art, declared nature the standard for all pictures, and explained his practice of "differential focusing." This involved focusing the image sharply in the center and softly on the edges, a method he believed most closely approximated normal human vision. Amazingly, only a year after the book was published, he abandoned his belief that photography was an art and issued the black-bordered pamphlet The Death of Naturalistic Photography. Nonetheless, a whole generation of advanced amateurs was inspired to begin making creative photographs by his methods.
 
In 1895, the Royal Photographic Society awarded Emerson its prestigious progress medal for artistic achievement, and five years later it gave him a retrospective of nearly 150 photographs. After this show, Emerson ceased exhibiting and allowing his work to be published, though he continued to photograph. Throughout most of Emerson’s career he issued medals to photographers whose work he admired, beginning with Alfred Stieglitz and ending with Brassaï.
 
Late in life, Emerson wrote a history of photography, the manuscript for which has never been found. He died on May 12, 1936, a day short of his eightieth birthday.
 
Christian A. Peterson Pictorial Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Christian A. Peterson: Privately printed, 2012)
 
This biography is courtesy and copyright of Christian Peterson and is included here with permission.
 
Date last updated: 1 June 2013.
 
Approved biography
Courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK)
 
Emerson bought his first camera in 1881 and in 1885 founded the Camera Club of London. He was impressed by contemporary French painting, including that of the Impressionists, and argued for 'naturalistic' photography. For him, truth to nature consisted of accurately recreating the depth and density of space and atmosphere. Most of his pictures were taken in East Anglia in the 1880's, and his studies of landscapes, people at work, and scenes from daily life survive in the form of seven illustrated books, including 'Life and Landscape of the Norfolk Broads' and 'On English Lagoons'.
 
This biography is courtesy and copyright of the Victoria & Albert Museum and is included here with permission.
 
Wikipedia
 
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.