May 22, 2007 - Sale 2115

Sale 2115 - Lot 62

Price Realized: $ 84,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 75,000 - $ 100,000
EMERSON, PETER HENRY & GOODALL, T. F. Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, Illustrated with Forty Beautiful Plates from Nature Executed in Platinotype. With 40 mounted platinum photographs, accompanied by the original text leaves. Oblong folio, leather-backed vellum gilt. Parr/Badger I 70. deluxe edition, one of 25 copies. London, [1886]
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Additional Details

The rare deluxe edition of Emerson's first book, with 40 plates and the accompanying text leaves. All of the 25 copies were sold, and the original negatives and printing plates were destroyed.

Emerson, a British scientist, naturalist, and physician, was fine art photography's only outspoken champion in the 1880s, proudly declaiming the medium's power as a potentially great art form. A proponent of "naturalistic photography," Emerson focused his lens on a picturesque area of England that he beautifully translated using the platinotype process.

Photo-historian Nancy Newhall notes that the book's impact was "astounding." One critic wrote that his pictures reflected "An unanswerable refutation of those who say there is no art in photography." Another called the album "epoch-making." Nancy Newhall: P.H. Emerson, The Fight for Photography as a Fine Art (Aperture, 1975), 41-42; 141, 145, 146-47, 159, 163, 167, 187, 197-98, 200, 202, 204, 206, 208, 210, 212, 215, 221.


"On the River Bure" (frontispiece) "Coming Home from the Marshes" "Setting the Bow-Net" "A Broadman's Cottage" "A Sailing Match at Horning, 1885" "The Village of Horning" (inexpert hand-coloring to upper right corner of image and mount) "An Eel-Catcher's Home" "Taking up the Eel-Net" "Water-Lilies" "Gathering Water-Lillies" "Snipe-Shooting" "A Ruined Water-Mill" The Old Order and the New" "A Norfolk Boat-Yard" "The First Frost" "The Haunt of the Pike" "Quanting the Marsh Hay" "Poling the Marsh Hay" "Setting up the Bow-Net" "Gunner Working up to Fowl" "The Fowler's Return" "Rowing Home the Schoof-Stuff" "Marshman Going to Cut Schoof-Stuff" "The River Bure at Coltishall" "Cantley: Wherries Waiting for the Turn of the Tide" "A Reed-Cutter at Work" "Towing the Reed" "Ricking the Reed" "During the Reed-Harvet" "A Marsh Farm" "Cattle on the Marshes" "A Reed Boat-House" "Cutting the Gladdon" "The Gladdon-Cutter's Return" "Quanting the Gladdon" "A Rushy Shore" " 'Twixt Land and Water" "Evening" "An Autumn Morning" "The Fringe of the Marsh."