Peter Henry Emerson

Peter Henry Emerson British, b. Cuba, 1856-1936 Trained as a physician, Peter Henry Emerson abandoned medicine soon after receiving his degree in order to take up photography. His thorough command of the medium and his interest in reproducing rural subjects in a simple, direct manner led to an approach that he called naturalism. Emerson argued vehemently that the inherent qualities of photography should be used to portray subjects in a manner that eschewed artifice and the unnatural intrusions of the photographer's aesthetic style. This was in distinction to the academicism that Emerson...