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companying another missionary photographer, James
Cameron. His account of his travels and photography
was published in Harper’s Monthly in April 1859.
Believing that visual material would support his
missionary activities even more than the printed word,
his camera became a powerful tool, and in his accounts
of his travels, he recorded the reaction of the natives to
seeing their own likenesses for the fi rst time. He was
taught photography by Roger Fenton.
Ellis was also a botanist, and is credited with the
discovery of a number of species of orchids in eastern
Madagascar during further journeys to the islands in
the late 1860s.
His images survive in a number of major collections
in the US and Britain.
John HannavyEMERSON, PETER HENRY (1856–1936)
English photographer and writerPeter Henry Emerson was born in Cuba on 3 May- His American father, Henry Ezekiel Emerson,
distantly related to the author Ralph Waldo Emerson,
owned a sugar plantation on the island, but due to his
poor health, the family moved in 1864 to Wilmington,
Delaware. Three years later, however, Emerson’s father
died and after a short stay in Cuba the young boy’s
mother took the family back to Wilmington where he
began his formal education. In 1869 the family again
moved, this time to England, where Emerson spent the
rest of his life, taking the option of British nationality
that was open to him via his English grandfather. His
academic progress was impressive both at school and
subsequently at university in London and Cambridge.
He studied medicine, gaining his MRCS in 1879 and
his MB in 1885. Despite being considered one of the
best medical students of his generation, Emerson, who
was fortunate in having a private income, decided not
to practise medicine and devoted himself instead to
a variety of interests. In 1881 he purchased his fi rst
camera and it is for his photographs and for his writing
that he is now best remembered. All of his published
photographic work, with minor exceptions, appeared
between 1886 and 1895. He continued to write, however,
on his family history and on a variety of other subjects,
to the end of his life.
Emerson was married in June 1881, to Edith Amy
Ainsworth, a nurse whom he had met during his medical
studies. At the end of that year, the couple took a holiday
in Italy. It seems to have been here that Emerson began
to develop his strongly-held views on art and nature. In
August 1883 he took a holiday in the coastal town of
Southwold in Suffolk, in the part of England that was
to become the inspiration and location for most of his
subsequent work. Also in that year he joined the Photo-
graphic Society Club, London. Two years later, in 1885,
Emerson returned to Southwold and, together with his
brother, hired a yacht for a cruise on the Norfolk Broads.
On this cruise he met the painter Thomas Frederick
Goodall (1857–1944). Goodall, a Norfolk man, had
trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and was
an exponent of the French-infl uenced ‘Naturalistic’ style
of painting with which Emerson had strong sympathies.
Emerson and Goodall became fi rm friends and artistic
collaborators and for the following six years Emerson’s
photographic activities were concentrated mainly in
rural Norfolk.
In 1886 Emerson, with Goodall as co-author, pro-
duced Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, a large
book of forty platinum prints, with a text describing
aspects of life in and around the inland waterways of
Norfolk. Two more books followed in 1887; Pictures
from Life in Field and Fen, and Idyls of the Norfolk
Broads. These were illustrated with photogravures
made, Emerson stated, directly from his negatives. The
platinum prints of Life and Landscape on the Norfolk
Broads had been made in Scotland by Valentine and
Sons, of Dundee. These prints were of variable quality
and it was possibly this experience that contributed to
Emerson’s choice of photogravure for all his subsequent
publications, although the close relationship between
the methods and materials of photogravure and of the
artistic medium of etching was probably a more infl u-
ential factor.
In the introduction to Pictures from Life in Field and
Fe n, Emerson claims, of the photogravure: “If success-
fully performed, it is purely an automatic process, so that
the resulting copper plate is a facsimile of the negative,
no translator stepping in to mar the work.” It is clear,
however, that considerable retouching has been carried
out on these images, which was the normal practice of
reproductive printmakers at this time. Emerson, while de-
ploring this practice, had little control over it. In the same
introduction he states: “The plates are, as a rule, entirely
free from retouching, and any hand-work that has been
introduced is a cause of regret to us, and we are in no way
responsible for it, for our idea of a perfect photo-etching
or engraving process is one in which the resulting copper
plate is entirely the effect of chemical action.”
In 1888 followed Pictures of East Anglian Life,
illustrated with thirty-two photogravures and fi fteen
small half-tones in Collotype. Then in 1889 came the
book that was described by one of Emerson’s contem-
poraries as having the effect of “a bombshell dropped
into the midst of a tea-party.” Emerson’s fi rst edition
of Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art
set out, in uncompromising fashion, his views on art
and on photography, on the characteristics of the eye,
on contemporary artistic practice, and the consequentEMERSON, PETER HENRY
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