Background
Peter Henry Emerson was born in 1856 in Cuba.
Peter Henry Emerson was born in 1856 in Cuba.
He attended Cranleigh School, King's College Hospital, London, and Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied the natural sciences and took a medical degree in 1885.
Emerson first began to photograph as an aid to an anthropological study of the peasants and fishermen of East Anglia. He later abandoned his medical training to pursue both the practice and artistic theories of photography.
Emerson was the first photographer to promote the craft as an independent art and the first to formulate an aesthetic theory about it. He established the Emerson medal, which he issued to such photographers as Stieglitz, Cameron and Nadar.
Working exclusively in platinum prints and gravures, Emerson pioneered “naturalistic" photography, becoming its leading advocate, theoretician and practitioner. In order to replicate scenes as he believed the human eye saw them, he advised sharp focus only at the center of the image, allowing the background to be soft-focused. Largely due to his theories, he was considered one of the leading photographers of his time, but he later rescinded his philosophy in his book The Death of Naturalistic Photography. His work was well executed, with subtle tonalities, evoking a naturalness unusual in his generation.
In 1881 he married Miss Edith Amy Ainsworth and wrote his first book while on his honeymoon. The couple eventually had five children.