Emerson's Naturalistic Vision

 
 
 

Emerson's alignment with the scientific half of photography's doublet stems from his structuration of art around the proofs of physiological science to arrive at an as-the-eye-sees-it approach. The idea was to photographically replicate the scene of nature as spied by the human eye. To this extent, Emerson's thinking is related to the idea of photography as "a reflection of nature," championed by the scientific branch of the institutional field. But the eye was connected to a nervous system and that to a brain, both of which had a capacity for mediation for which the "purely mechanical" theories of mainstream scientific photography couldn't account. Emerson drew on science in a different way to these. He used physiological investigations of the human eye as the basis for his use of differential focussing and as a driving force for a theory of negative development. Physiology also demonstrated the existence of a hybrid 'seeing' subject from whose ranks might emerge the artistic photographer. At the end of the day, however, the language of positivism doesn't prevail in Emerson. Both terms of the science / art doublet are intertwined in his photography measure for measure.

In Natutalistic Photography, Emerson placed equal importance on what he called the "selection" and "execution" phases of photography. Selection was the requirement placed on the photographer to fragment the continuity of nature by exercising a choice of what to photograph. The choice must ensure that the selected scene spoke of the abstracted whole. Execution was the manipulation of the apparatus that followed selection, and the photographer must have "complete control over both selection and execution". Unlike his pedantries on the correctness of execution, Emerson was less than specific in his instructions on how to select the scene. The power of selection could only be attained by the constant process of looking at nature, and only then if the photographer was naturally equipped to see. Execution, on the other hand, was the site of stringent regulation. Of the many lenses available to his contemporaries of 1889, Emerson stipulated that only the Dallmeyer rectilinear landscape lens would do. He did so because the Dallmeyer lens could be made to satisfactorily imitate the scientifically proven functioning of the human eye. This was the principle of "differential focussing", Emerson's most controversial innovation. He foreshadowed it by stressing relevant physiological proofs of the disparities between the clarity of the object occupying the centre of the field of vision and those at the periphery. Differential focussing, through the Dallmeyer lens, allowed the main object of the photographer's vision to be represented in clear focus with an "eye-like" degree of defusion occurring beyond its boundaries.

Having selected a scene from nature and focussed in the prescribed manner, a gelatino-bromide plate was exposed, and only this would do. After exposure, the photographer quickly returned to the laboratory "whilst yet the mental impression of what you are trying for is fresh". That "mental impression" was not a loose shorthand for "memory" but the scientific complexity of nerves and sensory organs on which Emerson had already expounded. The image which passed through an appropriately focussed Dallmeyer lens was mapped on to that carried by the mental and sensual apparatus, modified to fit where necessary, and the resulting compound made material when the negative was developed.

For Emerson, development was the means of accurately representing tones. Again he uses scientific research as a generating force for his instructions. Drawing on Hermann von Helmholtz, he concludes that it is impossible to transcribe the tone of each pictorial object in a literal way. What is possible, however, is an accurate rendition of the ratio or relation of one tone to the next, a relation which would hold good irrespective of the light conditions under which the photograph was viewed. The negative was developed with this in mind, by plunging it into a series of baths containing different chemical solutions and by the use of local treatments, but the exact mixtures and solvents are not specifiable, they will vary from instance to instance. After this materialisation of vision, execution was radically standardised in an attempt to preserve the integrity of the reified negative. To guard against tonal and linear distortions, only platinotype printing was permissible, and on no account should the negative be retouched or the photograph enlarged.

The requirements of the execution phase seem to make Emerson's photography the most tightly regulated of all, but he left critical gaps in his pivotal stringencies. These gaps in the determinations, left for an active, thinking photographer to step into, were not to the liking of his more scientifically minded critics. For instance, differential focussing held that only the "principal object" of the picture should be clear, and even this should be "slightly - very slightly" out of focus. The surrounding planes should be "slightly" out of focus, and Emerson stressed that this must stop short of destroying the structure of the picture. Yet how is the photographer to know at what point structure is destroyed? The Photographic Journal of March 1893 records W.E. Debenham's objections to differential focussing:

It would be necessary to provide a definition as to how far sharpness was not to be wanting before structure was destroyed. A gentleman had once shown him [Debenham] one of Dr Emerson's photographs and, covering a portion of it, had asked 'Now, what is that?' referring to a particular part. Judging from the background and the rest of the picture, the portion in question was a tree, but it would have passed just as well for an old broom - the structure was so completely destroyed.

The point at which the "tree" became the "old broom" was a matter of judgement, and this subjective capacity couldn't be controlled by Emerson's technological procedures, it was at the discretion of the artist.

The same need for a critical judgement occurred during development. Emerson's standardisation of the post-development phase was designed to protect the integrity of the negative but, unlike printing, development had to be a highly plastic procedure. Development was the single most important area of execution. It was at this point that the photographer's "interpretation of nature" took on a material form. It owed something to the objective properties of nature but it was made to take these on-board through the manipulations of the artist. Emerson's true relation of tones was not simply given by the chemical process, it had to be established during development under the "complete control" of the photographer. There was, simultaneously, a reference to nature and an operational aspect which involved "no haphazard work, but complete control, so that we can mould the picture according to our will". (167) This type of moulding required a plastic equipment, and development was the most significant example of plasticity: "it is on account of the plasticity of the process of development that we can at once take our stand and repudiate the ignorant assertion that photography is a mechanical process". (164-165)  Plasticity was required so that the photographer could, precisely, "develop" nature. Emerson called this "interpretation."

The regulations imposed on execution couldn't be entirely prescriptive. The photographer could learn how to compose in the way that Robinson advocated and Emerson shunned, but how did one know how to select? When was structure destroyed? At what point of development was the "true ratio of densities" reached? What was the point at which truth became illusion? These were matters to be determined by a hybrid artistic photographer acting in conjunction with nature. In accordance with the language of positive science, Emerson required a referent against which the truth of the photographic text could be judged, and he repeatedly told his students that the referent was nature. This is what set naturalism aside from less rigorous artistic movements such as impressionism. Emerson made the distinction that, whereas impressionists might claim any quirk of personal vision as art, the truth of a naturalistic photograph could be judged by referring it to a standard: "To us Impressionism means the same as Naturalism, but since the word allows so much latitude to the artist, even to the verging on absurdity, we prefer the term Naturalism, because in the latter the work can always be referred to a standard - Nature". (22)

It was at this positive point that Emerson took an apparently transcendental turn. In his as-the-eye-sees-it approach, not just any human eye could see the standard accurately enough to produce the textual interpretation. Emerson required a privileged subject who was capable of seeing and producing; a figure he resolved with his physiologically proven concept of "the seer". Emerson's version of the seer described a highly individuated photographer whose vision transcended that of the masses. The masses were condemned forever to remain at the level of the photographic "operator" while the seer alone could aspire to the status of artistic photographer. Yet, just as the positive procedures on the regulation of the equipment broke down to leave a gap to be sutured by artistic judgment, the transcendental attributes of the seer were governed by the determinations of nature. Nature had the capacity to throw forward occasional individuals whose sensory organs were more highly differentiated than those of the masses. Their power of vision transcended that of the majority but their transcendental formation was no less of a natural phenomenon. Such was the delicate balance between artist and nature demanded by Emerson.

What Emerson wouldn't countenance was the need for all photographers to be seers, or for all subjects to exercise a degree of control in their relations with the world. It was this naturally selective regulation of a photographer's aspirations, a regulation which was beyond any individual's control, that drew most ground fire from Emerson's opponents. This, coupled with his frequent deprecation of others' work - even other naturalistic photographers such as George Davison - fuelled the criticism that Emerson regarded himself as the only seer in artistic photography. Even given the existence of a handful of other photographers on Emerson's wavelength, the theory was burdened with an elitism which threatened to undercut its capacity to communicate, and communication was important to naturalistic photography. The interpretations of the artistic photographer were designed for an audience. The theory required an understorey of subjects who were capable of seeing nature well enough to judge the photograph's veracity but who had no necessary capacity to produce an artistic photograph: "there are peculiar mental qualities required in production which the sympathetic admirer does not necessarily possess, although he may possess high mental qualities of another kind".

It was a theory of leaders and led with no opportunity for upward mobility, but the elitist figure of Emerson's seer was by no means unknown to modernity. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the son-in-law of the composer Richard Wagner, called the first edition of Naturalistic Photography "an epoch making book, which does honour to himself [Emerson] and to England". Chamberlain identified Emerson's "arrogance and petulance" as "qualities which the author of Naturalistic Photography has in common with all real reformers and originators". This type of dictatorial dead-end was one destination of Emerson's discourse, but there were others. Later, but based on the same epistemological ground that spawned Naturalistic Photography, F.R. Leavis transferred the mental qualities of the seer to the body of the sympathetic admirer and produced "the critic". At a local level, and inspired by the same logic as Emerson, various "straight" photographic movements carried artistic photography into the twentieth century. Some of these quoted naturalism but few followed the rigours of the doctrine to the extent of Emerson.