Marsh Weeds

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

Emerson’s early photographs emphasized naturalism, but his late works such as this one demonstrate influences from Japanese art, French Impressionism, and the painting and graphic art of Whistler, who was a personal acquaintance. This looser, more expressionistic, and emotional late style helped lay the groundwork for Pictorialist photography (for example, see 1980.141), the movement that succeeded in getting photography more widely accepted as a fine art. Around the time Emerson made this image, one of his most artistic, he wrote that he no longer believed photography to be an art form.