Introduction to the History of Photography

'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'.   http://www.archive.org/details/marshleaves00emeriala 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,...

Peter Henry Emerson  b. 1856 Sagua la Grande, Cuba, d. 1936 Great Britain 
 Born in Cuba and raised there and in the United States before moving to England as a teenager, physician and scientist Peter Henry Emerson took up photography at age twenty-six. Often described as a difficult zealot, he vocally championed a naturalistic approach to imagemaking. He favored rural subjects presented in a simple, direct manner. Emerson's influential 1889 book Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art outlined his thesis that photography's ability to record nature truthfully was its most expressive one. He argued that the photograph should imitate nature rather than alter it. 

Emerson was a passionate lecturer and writer about photography, never mincing words and thus earning as many foes as supporters. He was an early and tireless champion of photography as a fine art, and he became the unofficial godfather of the Photo-Secessionist movement, founded by Alfred Stieglitz in 1902. ...