During the Reed Harvest, from Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads

Railing against the contrived artificiality of contemporary photography trends, Peter Henry Emerson advocated a theory of "Naturalistic Photography" that also argued for the medium's legitimacy as an art form. Emerson's approach, based on scientific principles, aimed to replicate nature exactly as the eye comprehended it. By using a slightly out of focus lens, for example, Emerson imitated the human field of vision as he believed it existed - sharper in the center and blurred at the margins. Accordingly, he also preferred the platinotype, or platinum print, for its delicate gray tones. Emerson lived and worked in the marshy countryside of East Anglia, a coastal section of England, northeast of London, where the tradition of gathering reeds or grasses for thatching roofs persisted. It was a dying way of life and one Emerson sought to capture as industrialization and the railway encroached on its existence.