A Rushy Shore.
Photograph
Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, Ltd.
English, estab. by 1879
A Rushy Shore.
P.H. Emerson and T.F. Goodall, --Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads.-- London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1886. pl. XXXV
ca. 1885
Platinum print, printed ca. 1886 by Valentine & Sons, Dundee
Image: 19.5 x 28.6 cm
Mount: 29 x 41 cm
Gift of William C. Emerson, 1959
1979.4338.0015
Inscriptions mount verso-(in pencil) "Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads"
"A Rushy Shore"
"A Rushy Shore"
TextIn 1885, Peter Henry Emerson left his career as a surgeon in order to devote himself to photography. Even though he was a strong advocate of photography as an art form, he denounced Robinson’s combination printing as a distortion of both nature and photography. Instead, inspired by French realist painting and the scientific principles of human vision rhetorically associated with Impressionism, he advocated an approach to photography that he termed “Naturalism.” Adjusting his focus to simulate his understanding of human perception, he strove to communicate an experience of place untarnished by modern life. His first album of photographs, titled Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886), included scenes of rural life as well as evocative images like this one, which foreshadows the tendency toward abstraction in the work of later modern photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz (whom Emerson discovered when he chose Stieglitz as the winner of Amateur Photographer’s 1887 photography contest).
Lisa Hostetler, Ph.D.
Curator in Charge, Department of Photography
Label for A History of Photography [Rotation 1]
May 9–September 28, 2014
Lisa Hostetler, Ph.D.
Curator in Charge, Department of Photography
Label for A History of Photography [Rotation 1]
May 9–September 28, 2014