Photographing in East Anglia, the low, marshy landscape on the east coast of southern England, Peter Henry Emerson created an extended ethnographic portrait of the isolated, often impoverished, rural communities before what he believed would be their inevitable disappearance. Between 1886 and 1895, Emerson published eight sumptuously illustrated photographic books and portfolios that, based on interviews and observation, provided detailed ethnographic information about these communities, their livelihood, beliefs, and the landscape that formed and sustained them.
“Ricking the Reed” and “Quanting the Gladdon”, the first two images along this wall, were composed jointly by Emerson and T. F. Goodall, a minor naturalistic landscape painter, for Emerson’s first publication Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886). The accompanying text describes in minute detail the harvesting activities that were staged for the photographs. Beyond their ethnographic information, Emerson sought to distill the relationship of the people and their environment in this harsh and watery landscape.