Farmworkers during the Barley Harvest in Suffolk, Peter Henry Emerson, 1883 - 1888
Unlike most of Emerson’s photographs, this one from Pictures of East Anglian Life seems rather posed. Perhaps he was thinking of the paintings by the famous French Realists Gustave Courbet and Jules Breton. He wrote the following about this in his book: ‘I have endeavoured in the plates to express sympathetically various phases of peasant and fisherfolk life...’