Emerson, Peter Henry
£5,600
Books, Maps, Photographs & Manuscripts
Auction: 12 July 2005 at 13:00 BST
Description
Idyls of the Norfolk Broads. Being Twelve Autogravure Plates from Original Negatives together with Descriptive Text and Introductory. London: The Autotype Company, [1888], oblong folio, Proof on India paper number 59 of 150 copies, 12 plates on India paper, original half cloth portfolio with pictorial design on upper cover, boards soiled and worn, a few mounts lightly spotted
Footnote
Provenance: Frederic Leighton, bookplate
Note: Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) strongly championed a naturalistic approach to photography in the 1880's, outlining his ideas that the photographer should imitate nature rather than attempt to alter it in his influential book Naturalistic Photography for Students of Art (1889). Using his medical training he observed that the human eye only focuses on the main object of its attention and that everything all around this was in fact out of focus. He therefore concluded that to imitate this a photograph should be slightly out of focus except at its main subject point. To illustrate his theories Emerson collaborated with the artist T.F. Goodall to produce a book, Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886), illustrated with forty platinum prints. This was such a success that Emerson gave up his medical career to concentrate on photographic books, Idylls of the Norfolk Broads being his second such work. Although he later retracted his theories in The Death of Naturalistic Photography (1890) his ideas and photographs laid the groundwork for the Photo-Seccession movement founded in 1902 by Alfred Steiglitz.