page_title: Peter Henry Emerson
section_title: Photography
hierarchical_section_title: Peter Henry Emerson / Biography / Photography
caption_attribution_description: Blackshore, River Blythe, Suffolk by Peter Henry Emerson from his illustrated book 'Pictures of East Anglian Life'. In the book, Emerson describes this scene as follows: "This is Blackshore on the River Blythe - Blackshore, of which we read that once spacious warehouses were erected on its wharf 'for the stowage of nets and other stores, one room of which is capable of holding a thousand tons of salt;' that a dock was made there in 1783, and that in the same year twenty fishing-busses met there for the white-herring fishery. It seems this quay was made in James the First's reign, and must have been the scene of busy life when Dunwich, Walberswick, and Southwold were flourishing with their fisheries; but as the greater places fell to nothingness, so has this little place proportionately fallen into utter decay..."
context_page_description: Peter Henry Emerson was a British writer and photographer. His photographs are early examples of promoting straight photography as an art form. He is known for taking photographs that displayed rural settings and for his disputes with the photographic establishment about the purpose and meaning of photography.
context_section_description: He bought his first camera in 1881 or 1882 to be used as a tool on bird-watching trips with his friend, the ornithologist A. T. Evans. In 1885 he was involved in the formation of the Camera Club of London, and the following year he was elected to the Council of the Photographic Society and abandoned his career as a surgeon to become a photographer and writer. As well as his particular attraction to nature he was also interested in billiards, rowing and meteorology.
  Initially influenced by naturalistic French painting, he argued for similarly "naturalistic" photography and took photographs in sharp focus to record country life as clearly as possible. His first album of photographs, published in 1886, was entitled Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, and it consisted of 40 platinum prints that were informed by these ideas. Before long, however, he became dissatisfied with rendering everything in sharp focus, considering that the undiscriminating emphasis it gave to all objects was unlike the way the human eye saw the world.
  He then experimented with soft focus, but was unhappy with the results that this gave too, experiencing difficulty with accurately recreating the depth and atmosphere which he saw as necessary to capture nature with precision. Despite his misgivings, he took many photographs of landscapes and rural life in the East Anglian fenlands and published seven further books of his photography through the next ten years. In the last two of these volumes, On English Lagoons (1893) and Marsh Leaves (1895), Emerson printed the photographs himself using photogravure, after having bad experiences with commercial printers.
caption: Blackshore, River Blythe, Suffolk from Emerson's illustrated book 'Pictures of East Anglian Life', 1888
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