Gunner Working Up to Fowl

P. H. Emerson’s work grew from an examination, at once both highly personal and anthropological, of the environment and daily rituals of rural life in East Anglia, the marshy coastal region northeast of London. In the course of his ten-year photographic career, he passed on his expertise in more than a half-dozen illustrated books, but his first publication, Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, in which this platinum print appeared as one of forty plates, remained his most lavish production. The accompanying text described the scene: “A gunner, in the grey morning light, which the tone of the plate so well renders, is sculling up to some fowl which he has marked down among the rushes in a shallow corner of the Broad. Lying right down in the bottom of his punt, no part of him can be seen from the water.”

In breaking the existing molds of ambitious photography—sharp, straightforward documentation on the one hand and contrived tableaux on the other—and opting for a more impressionist or, in his words, “naturalistic” style that more closely simulated human vision, Emerson blazed the trail that would be followed by the American Pictorialists, the Photo-Secession, and modern photography.