Finding Emerson

Emerson, the forgotten trailblazer

Peter Henry Emerson was a Victorian photographer, artist, naturalist, physician and writer who was drawn to rural subjects. He was born in Cuba in 1856 and moved to England as a teenager, capturing images around Great Yarmouth and the Norfolk Broads between 1885 and 1895. He was fascinated by East Anglia's traditional ways of life and travelled extensively across the region. Emerson believed photography was an independent artform, but his views were dismissed by other artists who viewed it as a hobby or a trade and as inferior to painting.

With a firm belief in naturalistic photography and truth to nature, Emerson railed against his contemporaries and their studio constructs - that often included staged rustic scenes featuring models in costume - that fed into idealised Victorian notions of the countryside. He went on to write the first manual on straight photography as an art in its own right, that was likened to “a bombshell dropped at a tea party" by influential American art critic Nancy Newall. He was also one of the first photographers to combine text and image in his publications.

He died in 1936 all but forgotten by the art world he ignited in the 1880s. It took until 1975 and the publication of a book Newhall, P.H.Emerson: The Fight for Photography as a Fine Art, for the world to realise that he was the great trailblazer of modern photography and how, through his determination and weight of belief, he had changed the perception of photography for all time.

On display in the exhibition are a selection of works from two of Emerson’s photographic portfolios, Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, and, Wild Life on a Tidal Water. They highlight his dedication to depicting life as it was in the 19^thcentury by embedding himself in the landscape of East Anglia and capturing what he encountered. There are images of marsh farms, the harvesting of reed beds, smelters, fishermen and eel catchers as well as house boats, cottages, wherries and water mills.