Peter Henry Emerson

Peter Henry Emerson is known for his photographs of late nineteenth century English rural life. Responding to French Naturalist painting, Emerson initially elected to photograph the countryside in sharp focus to accurately represent his referents. Later on, the photographer turned to soft focus images, recreating, as he thought, the natural focusing patterns of human eyes. Photographs such as The Snow Garden are examples of this new exploration with focus and softness. This work was created in the East Anglian fens as part of his project Marsh Leaves, one of Emerson’s most substantial bodies of work.

Emerson was born in 1856 on his father’s plantation in Cuba. He immigrated to the United Kingdom in 1869 and later began to study Medicine at King’s College London, before switching to Clare College, Cambridge. In the early 1880s, he took up photography to photograph birds, leading to a long term interest in the medium. From 1886 he made frequent trips to the Norfolk Broads, where he created a series of sharp-focus photographs entitled Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads. In the 1890s, he produced two series of more soft-focus images depicting similar subjects, the final photographic projects of his career: On English Lagoons (1893), and Marsh Leaves (1895). He died in 1936.