Footnotes

• Literature:
  Turner, P. & Wood, R., P.H. Emerson: Photographer of Norfolk (London: Gordon Fraser, 1974), plate 17
  
  Artist, anthropologist, scientist, naturalist and historian, Peter Henry Emerson is best known for his poignant photographs of a rural landscape under threat from industrialisation. A professional, upper-class gentleman, Emerson admired the landless labourers of Suffolk and Norfolk, revering them as symbols of an older, purer England, untainted by progress and upheaval. He set out to capture their way of life before it was lost forever.
  
  Going against pictorialism, Emerson asserted that a photograph should show the landscape and its people as it appeared to the naked eye - this he believed would reveal the true relationship between man and the land. His use of single viewpoint and differential focusing, both of which sought to capture imperfections and blurring as the eye saw them, was widely attacked. Yet it embued his images with a realism and immediacy that the elaborate studio mock-ups of the time often lacked.

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Category: Fine Art / Photographs

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