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Early Broads’ Photographers

Jennings & Emerson

John Payne Jennings

John Payne Jennings worked as a professional free-lance landscape photographer in the late 19th century. He was unique in his interpretation of the camera’s use with the pictorial attractions of East Anglia. The majority of his photography was done in the Norfolk Broads.

In the 1880’s and 1890’s his photography was familiar to thousands of travellers and tourists on the Great Eastern Railway Company. He was commissioned by the railway company to produce a series of photographs which were used on their railway carriages to advertise the whole Broadland area.

In 1890’s he published two pictorial books of photographs, “Sun Pictures of the Norfolk Broads” and “Photo Pictures in East Anglia”.

Peter Henry Emerson

Peter Henry Emerson was a writer and photographer who was influenced by naturalistic French painting. He strongly argued for similarly “naturalistic” photography. He took photographs in sharp focus to record country life in East Anglia as clearly as possible and therefore promoted photography as an art form.

Emerson’s photographs were unretouched. He strongly disagreed altering the image as manipulation, calling it “the process by which a good, bad, or indifferent photograph is converted into a bad drawing or painting”.

His first album of photographs, published in 1886, was entitled Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads. He took many photographs of landscapes and rural life in the East Anglian fenlands and published seven further books of his photography over the next ten years.