Norfolk, UK
(Peter Henry Emerson / Royal Photographic
Society / SSPL / Getty)
The Norfolk Broads are an area of interconnected rivers and lakes – ‘broads’ – in the east of England. Long thought to be natural features of the East Anglian landscape, the broads are now known to be the result of flooded medieval peat cutting.
This photograph of a Norfolk fisherman is taken from Peter Henry Emerson’s limited edition book Pictures From Life in Field and Fen. The fisherman is chewing on the stem of a clay pipe while cleaning a telescope.
A very successful surgeon, Emerson bought his first camera in his late twenties to use on ornithological trips, though ultimately it would prove to be the key to his new profession. As a founding member of London’s Camera Club, Emerson’s subject was largely the people and places of East Anglia and the Norfolk Broads. He found himself in conflict with many of the photographic profession, passionately arguing for the need of a scientific and naturalistic approach in photographs.
‘The evidence is clear enough that had the artists and scientists who were the promoters of the first English Photographic Society held their own, photography would have been practised by artists and scientists alone – a noble and learned profession – instead of being practised, as is now too often the case, by illiterate and ignorant tradesmen.’
Peter Henry Emerson, Introduction to Pictures from Life in Field and Fen, 1887
