thumb|Peter Henry Emerson
thumb|right|"Ricking the reed", from Emerson's first photographic album Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886)
Peter Henry Emerson (13 May 1856 – 12 May 1936) was a British writer and photographer. His photographs are early examples of promoting straight photography as an art form. He is known for taking photographs that displayed rural settings and for his disputes with the photographic establishment about the purpose and meaning of photography.
Biography
Early life
Emerson was born on La Palma Estate, a sugar plantation near Encrucijada, Cuba belonging to his American father, Henry Ezekiel Emerson and British mother, Jane, née Harris Billing. He was a distant relative of Samuel Morse and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He spent his early years in Cuba on his father's estate. During the American Civil War he spent some time at Wilmington, Delaware, but moved to England in 1869, after the death of his father. He was schooled at Cranleigh School where he was a noted scholar and athlete. He subsequently attended King's College London, before switching to Clare College, Cambridge in 1879 where he earned his medical degree in 1885.
Emerson was intelligent, well-educated and wealthy with a facility for clearly articulating his many strongly held opinions. In 1881 he married Miss Edith Amy Ainsworth and wrote his first book while on his honeymoon. The couple eventually had five children.
Photography
thumb|left|Blackshore, River Blythe, Suffolk from Emerson's illustrated book Pictures of East Anglian Life (1888)
He bought his first camera in 1881 or 1882 to be used as a tool on bird-watching trips with his friend, the ornithologist A. T. Evans. and the following year he was elected to the Council of the Photographic Society and abandoned his career as a surgeon to become a photographer and writer. As well as his particular attraction to nature he was also interested in billiards, rowing and meteorology.