980
He did not receive special academic training. He began
as Kustos Adjunkt” (Assistenz curator) at the Dienst der
Naturalien-Kabinette des kaiserlichen Hofes (today the
museum of Natural History in Vienna). From 1855 to
1858, he traveled Nubien (today the majority area of the
Sudan) and Central Africa, where he acquired, among
other things, animals for the imperial Menagerie in the
park of Schoenbrunn, Vienna. He returned to Africa as
an Austrian consulate representative to Khartum. He
died on December 17, 1862 of malaria. Johann Natterer
was born on October 13, 1821, in Vienna. He received
his medical degree, but worked like his brother Joseph
as an assistent curator) at the Dienst der Naturalien-
Kabinette des kaiserlichen Hofes. Apart from his main
profession as a physician (until 1874) and politician
in the Viennese local council (1861 to 1879), he also
worked as an inventor. In addition to the advancement
of the Daguerreotype to instananeous photography, with
the help of his brother, he created the construction of a
compressor pump involving the liquefaction of carbonic
acid, which set a new standard for the industry. He died
on December 25, 1900, in Vienna.
See also: Austro Hungarian Empire, excluding
Hungary; Societies, groups, institution, and
exhibitions in Austria; Daguerreotypie; Moment
photography
Maren Groening
Further Reading
Bauer, Alexander, “Johann Natterer 1821–1900,” in Öster-
reichische Chemiker-Zeitung, 4. Jahrgang, 1901, 1–8.
Starl, Timm, Biobibliografi e zur Fotografi e in Österreich 1839
bis 1945, 1998ff. (wird regelmäßig aktualisiert), http://alt.
albertina.at/d/fotobibl/einstieg.html.
Starl, Timm, Lexikon zur Fotografi e in Österreich 1839 bis 1945,
Wien: Album, Verlag für Photographie, 2005.
NATURALISTIC PHOTOGRAPHY
Naturalistic Photography was the term introduced by
Peter Henry Emerson to describe both the aspiration for
and practice of photography as a distinct form of art.
Initially articulated in “Photography as a Pictorial Art,”
fi rst in a lecture offered at the Camera Club of London on
March 11, 1886, and later printed in The Amateur Pho-
tographer (March 19, 1886), it received full treatment
in the manual, Naturalistic Photography for Students of
Art (1889). Emerson offered a theory of art grounded
in the principle that the fi nest art was that which was
true to nature, and, more specifi cally, true to nature as
perceived by the human eye. “Wherever the artist has
been true to nature, art has been good. Whenever the
artist has neglected nature and followed his imagination,
there has resulted bad art” (Emerson, 1886). Further,
the element that distinguished photography from other
visual systems was its inherent truthfulness. From this
core principle, he advised that for photography to be an
art form it must be independent, not imitative, of other
artistic forms, such as painting. “Truth to Nature” was
achieved under his system of “Naturalistic Photography”
when the photographer turned to nature for his subjects,
rather than created tableaux that mimicked the subjects
and compositional strategies of painting But more than
the stipulation to photograph the subjects found in na-
ture, Emerson decreed that in order for a photograph to
be “truthful” it must faithfully incorporate the way in
which the human eye apprehended the scene. In a long
prologue, Emerson had argued for the congruence of art
and science; one did not contradict the other and art must
incorporate the knowledge derived from science. This
had special relevance for photography and a theory of
human vision. As a medical student, Emerson had fol-
lowed the developments in achieving a scientifi c model
of human vision and he was particularly persuaded by
the physiologic mechanism of vision proposed by Ger-
man physicist Hermann von Helmholtz in Handbook
of Physiologic Optics (1867). Helmholtz described a
visual mechanism in which the human eye registers in
sharp detail only the limited portion of the visual fi eld
that it is directly focused on and attentive to, and that
elements that are not within the area of focal interest are
unsharp to a greater or lesser degree depending on their
position relatively to the central area of focus. For Em-
erson, Helmholtz’s theory of selective vision explained
the lack of artistry he found in photographs that were
disconcertingly sharply focused across the entire image.
They did not represent truthfully the world as seen by
the human visual apparatus.
Emerson translated Helmholtz’s model into the
practice he described as “differential focus,” the inter-
vention by the photographer, through choice of lens,
to limit sharpness to a single point in the image while
suppressing details in surrounding areas. The resultant
photograph more closely accorded with the way that
nature directly perceived would register in the eye.
Nothing in nature has a hard outline, but everything is
seen against something else, and its outlines fade gently
into that something else, often so subtlely that you cannot
quite distinguish where one ends and the other begins.
In this mingled decision and indecision, this lost and
found, lies all the charm and mystery of nature. (Emerson
1889, 150)
Emerson defi ned the equipment and procedures for
achieving naturalistic photographs: a whole plate size
view camera, a tripod, and most importantly, longer
focal length lenses with the correct “drawing power”
to render the scene in “natural” perspective with detail
correctly distributed throughout the scene in accord with
NATTERER, JOSEPH AND JOHANN
