reflections on the water. “On Moonlit River” is also an example of Emerson’s views on focusing. He preferred to carefully frame rather than retouch, focusing his lens on his primary subject to leave the rest of the photo softer, almost faded. He called his practice “’differential focusing,’ which, supposedly, would give effects similar to human vision,” Fuller wrote. 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 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
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Emerson sought to preserve the rural way of life in photogravures such as “Young Woman Peeling Potatoes,” from 1887.
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. N
Info: “The Honest Landscape: Photographs by Peter Henry Emerson” is at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University through May 4. Admission is free, and the museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Thursdays until 8. Go to museum.stanford.edu or call 650-723-4177.
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