Peter Henry Emerson – Wikipedia, free encyclopedia
Pedro Enrique Emerson (Sagua La Grande, Cuba, May 13, 1856-Falmouth, United Kingdom, May 12, 1936), better known as Peter Henry Emerson , he was an English photographer who defended the role of photography as an art that has his own creative resources using naturalistic budgets. He was a burning defender of taking photographs of the natural, without a later intervention on the negative or positive.
Childhood and youth [ To edit ]
He was born in Cuba in 1856, in his father’s sugarcane plantation. In 1869 he moved from Wilmington (Delaware), where he had attended school since the age of eight, to his mother’s native England. In 1879 he was titled in Medicine at the King’s College in London with brilliant academic results and continued his studies at Clare College, in Cambridge, before returning to King College Hospital to occupy a position as a doctor he obtained in oppositions. In 1882 he bought his first camera to illustrate an ornithology treatise that a friend prepared. In 1884 he moved to live Norfolk Broads, shortly after in 1886 he left the medical career and dedicated himself to writing and taking photographs. It also achieved remarkable goals in about half a dozen sports.
Your controversy in photography [ To edit ]
Since 1885 he was exhibiting photos and winning awards in different rooms, including at the Royal Photographic Society, in which he unleashed a great controversy over the works that were rewarded. As a energetic defender of his opinions, he gave lectures, wrote theories and criticism, organized and tried exhibitions and, most importantly, exhibited and published his own and revolutionary photographic images.
Emerson belittled the work of Henry Peach Robinson, then fashion photographer in England, [ first ] And he criticized not only the artificiality of the poses and their sentimentality, but also what constituted the central technique of Robinson: the obtaining of copies for combination of several negatives. Emerson criticized all manual interventions until the retouching and defended the purity of the unrelated direct image, and the photographic vision without artifice.
Naturalist or natural photography [ To edit ]
In 1889 he published his book Naturalistic photography ( Naturalist or natural photography ) that he collects his ideas about photography and exerted great influence later. [ 2 ] The last theories of color and findings of French painting influenced him, particularly the work of Courbet, Millet and the Impressionists. For Emerson the “sincere art” is a precise and sensitive response to natural events. The chromatic potential of painting was insurmountable, but photography, due to its absolute fidelity to tonal lines, constituted according to him an unique means of artistic expression.
Its proposal stimulates the photography outdoors and everyday scenes, which departs from the photograph that was carried out at that time focused on the activity in studies and the staging of photographic compositions.
The photographs of its first four illustrated publications: Norfolk Broads life and landscape (1886), Images of the life of the fields and swamps (1887), Dilios de Norfolk Broads (1894) and Scenes from life east of England (1888); They are a selection of what was done in 1885 and 1886. Although their common theme is the work and atmosphere of the peasantry in eastern England, so Emerson could be considered as one of the first documentaryists, the reasons always appear subordinated to the style And there are a number of artistic attitudes that denounce the author’s presence.
Emerson’s first works, such as the one entitled The graft , they have an important sociological content, although the aesthetic aspect is even more powerful and highlights the debt with Millet in terms of the distribution of lights and shadows and a great inventiveness for the composition. In the work Hunter following the ducks The reason disappears to be replaced by a dynamic form that advances through an environmental space, in a world formed by just a few tones of gray. The Dark image Invented shortly thereafter by Emerson, it became the key element of the photoscast style, [ required appointment ] Although Emerson was contrary to positivated pigments techniques, they used them in order to obtain this type of images.
At a transition point in its artistic development, [ required appointment ] Wild life in tide waters (1890) supposes Emerson’s return to the city of Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, as theme. Some of these photographs collect the work of men in said urban environment, but their greatest value lies in their modernity and abstraction, which arise from Emerson’s decision to use the technique of the differential approach that consists of focusing only one plane of the field of the field vision.
Discouraged by the previous results but delighted with the excellent engraving quality achieved by the Coll brothers for Wild life in tide waters , Emerson got the secrets of his trade and in English lagoons and swamp leaves That the definitive materialization of his way of seeing could be considered, he made the engravings by hand; [ required appointment ] In addition to photogravure he used other types of noble impressions such as platinotypy. In his consideration of the degree as his own means for the Fine Arts, [ required appointment ] Emerson was the precursor of Alfred Stieglitz. [ 3 ]
In 1890, two years after the publication of his book Naturalistic Photography , Emerson retracted his opinions in a letter entitled The Death of Naturalistic Photography ( The death of natural photography ). The implications of some experiments regarding the sensitivity of photographic materials, which preceded the invention of the photometer, led to the conclusion that photography being a purely mechanical process, could not aspire to the art category, since the Photographer should not alter tonal values through an act of pure aesthetic desire. As a consequence in the reissue of your book Naturalistic Photography Change the title of your last chapter Photography a pictorial art ( Photography a pictorial art ) by Photography not an art (Photography is not an art).
Emerson’s last year of photographic activity was 1891, [ required appointment ] during which he made the images to Swamp leaves published in 1895. even in his final and most achieved work, Winter sunrise , external influences are transluked as it reminds the English landscapeist Samuel Parker (1805-1891) and his work Snowy garden Save notable similarities with oriental drawings.
He died in 1936 in Falmouth.
References [ To edit ]
Bibliography [ To edit ]
- Emerson, P.H. (1972). Naturalistic photography (in English) . New York: Amphoto. ISBN 9780817404017 .
- Emerson, P.H. (1973). Naturalistic photography for students of the art. The death of naturalistic photography (in English) . New York: Arno Press. ISBN 9780405049538 . (Requires registration) .
- Newhall, N. (1975). P.H. Emerson : the fight for photography as a fine art (in English) . Nueva York: Aperture, Inc. ISBN 9780912334592 .
- McWilliam, N.; Sekules, V.; Brandon-Jones, M. (1986). Life and landscape : P.H. Emerson : art & photography in East Anglia, 1885-1900 (in English) . Norwich: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. ISBN 9780946009107 .
- Taylor, J. (2006). The old order and the new : P.H. Emerson and photography, 1885-1895 (in English) . Munich; New York: Prestel. ISBN 9783791336992 .
external links [ To edit ]
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