-PDBM/FXT
18th Annual
“Sunrise at Sea� by Peter Henry Emerson.
PHOTOGRAPHY Continued from page 12
In Emerson’s writings that accompanied his photography, he was often detailed about the lives of the people he encountered in East Anglia. Fishing and farming practices fascinated him. For all Emerson’s artistic passion, his career was short. After his heyday in the 1880s, he published his last East Anglia book in 1895 and almost entirely gave up photography by 1900. And his career as a defender of the artistic merits of photography? Even shorter. In 1891, Emerson announced that he had changed his mind. He published a pamphlet called “The Death of Naturalistic Photography� in which he now renounced photography as fine art. The flip-flop may have come from Emerson’s falling in with a different crowd. Rumor has it “Del: The Village by the River� by Peter Henry Emerson.
that the painter James McNeill Whistler, no fan of photography, swayed him to change his mind. In addition, Emerson had become taken with Japanese artists such as the printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Simplified visual forms began to show up in Emerson’s photography, reflecting the Japanese influence. The 1895 photogravure “Marsh Weeds� is an example. The spare image of an open white field has a dim treeline in the back, but the eye is drawn to the small, meticulous black lines of the weeds in the snowy foreground, standing out like calligraphy. “The high level of artistic craftsmanship Emerson found in Japanese prints contributed to his eventual conviction that a photograph is not art, but merely a mechanical recording,� the exhibit card reads. Debate, it seems, springs eternal.
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