Together they wrote a narrative text to compliment the photographs. Emerson shared his excursions on the waterways of the Norfolk Boards with an artist friend, T.F. His subjects were fishermen, reed gatherers and farmers, showing the simple beauty of their everyday lives as they integrated with nature. He published his first album titled “Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Boards.” It consisted of 40 platinum prints of photographs exposed in the marshlands. Emerson’s pictorial photography was the antithesis of typical Victorian photography.ġ886 was a very productive year for Peter Henry Emerson. Both paintings and photographs could be staged productions and not concerned with truth or nature. During the Victorian Era the dominant style of art was romantic, sweet, and sentimental. “Gathering Waterlilies” may be the visual explanation of Emerson’s theory of art based on science. It was produced as an autogravure in two limited editions. The same year he published “Gathering Waterlilies,” the first photograph of nature ever produced as art from a negative, an epoch in the history of photography. In his lecture, Emerson rated photography as an art second to painting only because photography at the time could not provide color or a true tonal relationship. He explained that a natural photograph should echo what the human eye sees in nature. The lecture was “Photography: A Pictorial Art.” It was a theory of art based on science. In 1886 Emerson spoke to the Camera Club of London, a group he had helped found for amateur photographers. He pursued photography with the same verve he approached all interests, but one must keep in mind that nature was the core of his passion. In the same year Emerson entered and hung photographs in the annual Pall Mall exhibition held by the Photographic Society of Great Britain. He studied photography as a science in conjunction with physics and chemistry at Cambridge University. It was to be used as a tool on outings with his birding partner, the Ornithologist A.T. Emerson was the classical Victorian gentleman he could master and excel in any field of study or sport he selected.Įmerson purchased his first camera in 1882. Emerson was a naturalist, a skillful billiards player, founder of a rowing club, and was active in The Royal Meteorological Society. He authored more than thirteen books and countless articles.
He could afford the courage of his convictions and had the talent to articulate his opinions. During the last years of the Victorian Era, Peter Henry Emerson was a wealthy, well-educated, aristocratic, intelligent, handsome man.
0 kommentar(er)
