Poling the Marsh Hay. Artist: Peter Henry Emerson (British, born Cuba, 1856-1936). Dimensions: Image: 23.2 x 29 cm (9 1/8 x 11 7/16 in.)Mount: 28.6 x 40.9 cm (11 1/4 x 16 1/8 in.)Sheet ((Interleaving Plate Sheet)): 28 x 40.7 cm (11 x 16 in.). Date: 1886.P. H. Emerson's book "Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads," in which this image was one of forty plates, was the artist's first demonstration of the naturalism that he advocated for photography. While seeking the same goal as his ideological opposite, H. P. Robinson--recognition of photography as a fine art--Emerson drew his subjects not from literary narratives, but rather from an examination, at once both highly personal and anthropological, of the environment and daily rituals of rural life in East Anglia, the marshy coastal region northeast of London. Adamantly, even vociferously, opposed to Robinson's artificial manipulation of the medium, Emerson admitted into his own photographic vocabulary only selective focus and the caref