P.H. EMERSON PUT POETRY INTO PHOTOGRAPHY HE HELPED REVOLUTIONIZE HOW PICTURES WERE VIEWED.

Byline: Jim Farber

Staff Writer

Peter Henry Emerson is the most important and influential 19th-century photographer you've probably never heard of.

Born May 13, 1856, in Cuba, the son of a British sugar plantation owner and fourth cousin to Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was briefly in America during the Civil War before moving to England where he attended Cambridge University.

Emerson was a renowned athlete and outdoorsman, a physician, a self-styled anthropologist, a devoted Darwinian, a prolific writer/lecturer, and a vitriolic critic of those who contradicted his philosophy of photography as "pictorial art."

While the equipment Emerson used would have been familiar to the photographers of his day, his theories regarding photography as a means of observing nature were completely unique. And his guiding principle was the action of the human eye.

"The image which we receive by the eye," he wrote, "is like a picture minutely and elaborately finished in the center, but only roughly sketched in at the borders. The principal object in the photograph must be fairly sharp. Everything else must be subdued ... slightly out of focus."

Today, we take Emerson's "soft focus" approach for granted. But in 1886, when he published his first pioneering book of photographs and anthropological commentary, "Life and Landscapes on the Norfolk Broads," the effect caused quite a stir. When he elaborated upon his ideas in 1889 in an instructional treatise (and aesthetic diatribe) called "Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art," the effect, a writer of the day recalled, was like "a bombshell dropped in a tea party."

Prior to Emerson, the notion of "fine art photography" meant slavishly mimicking the sentimental style favored by painters of Victorian England.

Emerson called for an entirely new direction in photography based on observations drawn directly from nature, as exemplified in his most famous image, "Gathering Water-Lilies."

"Nature," he wrote, "is the great refiner, the poor man's poet and painter."

Wandering through the galleries of the Getty Museum, it's nearly impossible not to fall under the subtle spell of Emerson's images, with their somber skies, wafting reeds, glittering streams and stoic "peasants."

Perhaps Nancy Newhall, noted photography critic and author, stated it best: "P.H. Emerson was probably the first true photographer-poet."

THE OLD ORDER AND THE NEW: P.H. EMERSON AND PHOTOGRAPHY 1885-1895"

Where: Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood.

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and Sundays 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday; through July 8.

Tickets: Free. $8 for parking. Call [phone] or go to

www.getty.edu.

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1) THE HAYSEL, 1887

(2) THE HAUNT OF THE PIKE, 1886

(3) GATHERING WATER-LILIES, 1886