Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) and Edward Steichen (1879 1973), and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) and Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) are two sets of artist/photographers from two different eras. Their styles and techniques will be compared and contrasted, and their individual approaches to photography will be discussed.
Peter Henry Emerson has won his place in the history books for instigating a new school of landscape photography in England in the 1880s. In his own words, he "took several photographs that were destined to revolutionise photography and make my name in photographic circles" (Scharf, 1986, p. 3). His lack of modesty gave fuel to his critics who also took exception to his lack of social conscience. According to a biographical sketch in Life and Landscape, he felt himself to be part of an intellectual elite. He was, in fact, a renaissance man, well-schooled in medicine, sports, and photography, but he confined his picture-taking interests to local color, as typified by Pictures of East Anglian Life.
Emerson approached realism in his photographs, but only tentatively. In other words, he did not want to be too realistic, and thus miss the "big picture." Scharf quotes Emerson as stating, "We cannot record too many facts in science; the fewer facts we record in Art, and yet express the subject so that it cannot be better expressed, the better . . . In art, the big physical facts of nature must be truthfully rendered" (1986, p. 24).
In the above sense, Emerson was an impressionist, not a realist. According to Emerson, Realism was tainted by its infatuation with detail to the exclusion of the unifying effects of light. He was not concerned with copying the hues of nature with the utmost precision, as a painter such as Ruskin might have been; instead, he attempted to capture the playful intricacies of light, in the manner of Monet.
Edward Steichen's early training as an artist and his aesthetic sensibi...