Remembered as an British pictorialist photographer, Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) lived in Cuba and the United States before his widowed British mother moved the family back to England in 1869. After studying medicine at King’s College, University of Cambridge, Emerson received his Bachelor of Medicine in 1885 but abandoned his career as a surgeon the following year to become a photographer and writer. With few exceptions, his published photographic work appeared between 1886 and 1895, though he continued to write on a variety of subjects until the end of his life.

Drawn to East Anglia’s rural coastal region and its unchanging way of life in 1886, he with the painter Thomas Frederick Goodall (1857-1944) as co-author, published his first volume of photographs: Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886). Comprised of a large book of forty platinum prints with accompanying descriptive text in a style that he designated as “naturalistic”, these images exemplify the influence of the French Realist painters, especially Jean-Francois Millet’s depictions of rural peasants and farmers toiling in the fields. This series was quickly followed by five photographic publications illustrated with photogravures between 1887-1890 including Pictures from Life in Field and Fen (1887) and Pictures of East Anglian Life (1888).

In keeping with the Pictorialist photographic approach, Emerson’s acknowledgment of photography as a fine art equal to painting and other pictorial arts rested on his ideas of “Naturalism” while maintaining the notion of photography’s ‘truth to nature’. With his compositions he challenged the work of his contemporary rival Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901) by setting out to reconcile the ‘appreciation of the picturesque in landscape and figures’ with a process that was ‘entirely free from retouching’ or other forms of printing manipulation that required costumes, props, and actors to stage vignettes of rural life. In his belief that the camera lens provided similar effects to human vision, Emerson defended his “selective focus” (differential) approach and the use of only a single negative to realize his prints in his publication, Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art (1889). Only a year later, Emerson cast off his own theory and renounced his view of photography as an art form after conversations with an unnamed “great artist” and emerging scientific evidence of the fixed relationship between exposure and negative density. Despite this change of heart, he published two additional illustrated books, On English Lagoons (1893) and Marsh Leaves (1895) and re-issued Naturalistic Photography to include in his essay “The Death of Naturalistic Photography” in 1899. After the Royal Photographic Society presented a retrospective exhibition of his work in London (1900), he turned his attention to other literary and social pursuits. Emerson’s pure’ photography approach that he developed during his brief, but prolific career influenced a later generation of photographers including Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) and Paul Strand (1890-1976).

Recently, retrospectives of his work have been held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2007) and Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2010). His work can be found many museum collections including the Tate Britain, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Royal Academy of Arts, London; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Philadelphia Museum of Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Minneapolis Institute of Art; and Art Institute of Chicago.