A Year: Day to Day Men: 13th of May
The Perfection of His Repose
May 13, 1856 was the birthdate of British writer and photographer, Peter Henry Emerson who first promoted photography as an independent art.
Peter Emerson was born on the Palma Estate, a sugar plantation in Cuba, belonging to his American father and British mother. He spent his early years in Cuba, but moved to England in 1869, after the death of his father. He was schooled at Cranleigh School in Surrey and later at King’s College London, before switching to Clare College in Cambridge in 1879. There he earned his medical degree in 1885.
Emerson bought his first camera in late 1881 to be used on bird-watching trips with his friend, the ornithologist A.T. Evans. In 1886 he was elected to the Council of the Photographic Society and abandoned his career as a surgeon to devote his time to writing and photography, initially influenced by naturalistic French painting but gradually turning more to experimentation.
During his life Emerson fought against the British photographic establishment on a number of issues. In 1889 he published a controversial and influential book “Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art”, in which he explained his philosophy of art and straightforward photography. The book was a direct attack on the popular tradition of combining many photographs to produce one image that had been pioneered in the 1850s.
This method allowed the production of images that, especially in early days, could not have been produced indoors in low light, and it also made possible the creation of highly dramatic images, often in imitation of allegorical paintings. Emerson denounced this technique as false and claimed that photography should be seen as a genre of its own, not one that seeks to imitate other art forms. All Emerson’s own pictures were taken in a single shot and without retouching.
Emerson also believed that the photograph should be a true representation of that which the eye saw. Following contemporary optical theories, he produced photographs with one area of sharp focus while the remainder was unsharp. He vehemently pursued this argument about the nature of seeing and its representation in photography, to the discomfort of the photographic establishment.