Photography--landscapes and streetscapes.(Current and coming)

This month a selection of works by the influential photographer Peter Henry Emerson will be on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, in an exhibition entitled The Old Order and the New: P. H. Emerson and Photography, 1885-1895. Born in Cuba and raised in the United States and, from the age of fourteen, England, Emerson trained as a doctor but never practiced. Instead, he had a productive career as an author and a photographer of the English landscape in transition, as traditional rural life was rapidly being eroded by industrialization and tourism at the end of the nineteenth century. His primary subject was the Norfolk Broads, a marshy area in eastern England that remained relatively pristine for far longer than the rest of the country.

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Emerson's initial interest in photography was scientific--he began taking photographs to record the various species he observed while on bird-watching expeditions. Soon after, he started exploring the artistic possibilities of the medium. Inspired by contemporary painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage, James McNeill Whistler, and his own friend and collaborator Thomas F. Goodall, Emerson championed pictorial photography over mere topography, arguing in lectures, articles, and his 1889 book, Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, that true landscape photography should convey the look and feel of the whole scene rather than an ...