Marshman Going to Cut Schoof-Stuff
Medium
Platinum print, pl. XXII from the album "Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads" (1886)
Dimensions
Image/paper: 20.3 × 28.9 cm (8 × 11 7/16 in.); Album page: 28.6 × 40.8 cm (11 5/16 × 16 1/8 in.)
Classification
platinum print
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
145581
Art Historical Context
In 1886, British photographer Peter Henry Emerson captured quiet rhythm of rural life in *Marshman Going to Cutoof-Stuff*, a print from his seminal album *Life and Landscape the Norfolk Broads*. image depicts a lone marshman trudging through the misty wetlands of England's Norfolk Broads—a vast network of rivers, lakes, and reed beds—headed to harvest "schoof-stuff," a local term for reeds used in thatching roofs. Emerson, a pioneer of naturalistic photography, sought to portray everyday scenes with unmanipulated authenticity, rejecting the staged compositions of pictorialism. The platinum pr...
About the Artist
Peter Henry Emerson · 1856–1936
Peter Henry Emerson (1856–1936) was born on May 13 at his family's sugar plantation, La Palma Estate, near Encrucijada, Cuba, to an American father, Henry Ezekiel Emerson, and British mother, Jane Harris Billing. A distant relative of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Samuel Morse, he spent his early childhood amid the island's landscapes before moving to Wilmington, Delaware, during the American Civil War ...