Skip to main content

Peter Henry Emerson: nature and memory



'Gathering Water Lilies', 1886.
Platinum print, plate IX from
'Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads'
by Peter Henry Emerson




The Old Order and The New', 1886.
Platinum print. Photograph by Peter Henry Emerson.
An illustration from 'Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads'.
 




P. H. Emerson’s writings and photographs focused on photography and nature, the aesthetics of photography and the recording of nature. As an early  “conservationist”, the pristine landscape of East Anglia and its traditional ways of life (peasants, fishermen) in the process of being transformed and displaced by the combined threats of industrial and commercial progress and tourism, were his main subjects and preoccupation.  A quasi-pantheistic, romantic sensibility is expressed in his images, combined with a naturalistic purpose that searches for “truth” as the common denominator of both art, that is, culture and nature (natura naturans as the paradigm of artistic creativity), the projected unity of medium and subject: a naturalistic art, as he called it.

In many of his albums and photographic series, the literary description and the photographic document were created in similar fashion, as the immediate recording of experience. The subject however, as the medium of experience, that is, the artist himself, will (unwillingly or unconsciously) always have the upper hand and the last word in this quest for unconditional objectivity, a quest for the natural against the artificial, for the harmony of the world of nature against the troubled conditions of a civilization in the uncomfortable process of industrial growth, social change and cultural transformation.  The result is an idealized, romanticized image of the natural environment and of the social world of its inhabitants, these fisherman and peasants that are portrayed as more or less generalized beings in symbiotic relations with the world of nature, or as co-adjutants in the natural (autonomous) process of universal harmony. They are portrayed as belonging to a kind of self-sufficient microcosm, or “original” society, from which are excluded the realities of social class conditions, as well as the larger determining external structural hierarchies and related conflicts between the countryside and the urban centers of political and economic power.


But perhaps it is also fair to say that Emerson’s best works grew out of this “vivifying” particular soil of contradictory concepts and processes, as a kind of “autonomous” momentary synthesis of the question, that is, the challenge and the very “enigma” (artistic, epistemological, etc.) of photography itself, the quest for “photographic truth” as the (unattainable) “truth” of photography.

Marcelo Guimarães Lima


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Group f/64 Manifesto (1932)

Ansel Adams by Dorothea Lange Group f/64 Manifesto The name of this Group is derived from a diaphragm number of the photographic lens. It signifies to a large extent the qualities of clearness and definition of the photographic image which is an important element in the work of members of this Group. The chief object of the Group is to present in frequent shows what it considers the best contemporary photography of the West; in addition to the showing of the work of its members, it will include prints from other photographers who evidence tendencies in their work similar to that of the Group. Group f/64 is not pretending to cover the entire of photography or to indicate through its selection of members any deprecating opinion of the photographers who are not included in its shows. There are great number of serious workers in photography whose style and technique does not relate to the metier of the Group. Group f/64 limits its members and invitational names to those worke
1 comment
Read more

Post-photography

"The job of the photographer in the 21st century has become increasingly challenging as the practice is an overwhelmingly populist business. Anyone who has access to a camera has the power to become an artist, leaving a plethora of cached evidence on the internet for public consumption. This “found” internet content serves as a vast laboratory for major experimentation, underpinning the concept of post-photography, with endless possibilities for artists to recreate original works using avant-garde techniques drawn from both the digital and analogue eras." Fiona Martin (short presentation of the book Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera by Robert Shore) http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/post-photography / Perhaps there is less novelty here, regarding the context of photography transformed by the new image technologies developed in the late 20th century, in the particular sense that the early impact of photography itself transformed the regimes of vision and impact
1 comment
Read more

Calotype process

"The calotype negative process was sometimes called the Talbotype , after its inventor. It was not Talbot's first photographic process (introduced in 1839), but it is the one for which he became most known. Henry Talbot devised the calotype in the autumn of 1840, perfected it by the time of its public introduction in mid-1841, and made it the subject of a patent (the patent did not extend to Scotland). The base of a calotype negative, rather than the glass or film to which we have become accustomed, was high quality writing paper. The sheet of paper was carefully selected to have a smooth and uniform texture and, wherever possible, to avoid the watermark. The first stage, conducted in candlelight, was to prepare what Talbot called his iodized paper. The paper was washed over with a solution of silver nitrate and dried by gentle heat. When nearly dr
Post a Comment
Read more