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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHY |
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Sample Entry Day, Fred Holland
1864-1933 Day was born in South Dedham (later incorporated into Norwood), Massachusetts on 23 July 1864, the only child of wealthy and supportive parents. His father Lewis, a successful leather merchant and entrepreneur, was based in Boston where the Day family also had an apartment. Day's mother, Anna Smith Day, was philanthropic and individualistic, involved in the cultural, social, and charitable life of Boston. Day inherited this trait of helping and supporting and had the time and wealth to pursue the altruism which was to become the most important aspect of his life after 1900. Day's lifelong passions were literature, art, photography, and aesthetics. By his early twenties, he had amassed large collections of works relating to the English Romantic poet John Keats and the French writer Honoré de Balzac. He had also become interested in photography, writing to a friend, Ada Langley, in the summer of 1887 "[I] have become a full-fledged amateur in the art of photography, and a most delicious time I've had of it, too...". This same year, he struck up a relationship with the forthright Boston Irish Catholic poet, Louise Imogen Guiney. The question of romance was soon removed from the equation but the two remained friends for over 30 years. Day never married and, while it is widely assumed that he was homosexual, his sexual orientation was, like much else about him, a very private matter which remains unclear. Until 1888, Day fitted his photography around work as a depository secretary with a bookseller. After he left this employment he regularly travelled to Europe, especially London, for several months at a time, pursuing Keatsiana (eventually unveiling a bust of John Keats at Hampstead Parish Church in July 1894, paid for by public subscription organized and collected by Day and Guiney in Boston) and meeting luminaries like William Morris, William Butler Yeats, Arthur Symons and Oscar Wilde (whose autograph Day had secured as a schoolboy in 1882 during Wilde's US lecture tour) thus establishing connections that would bear fruit in both his publishing and photographic careers. During 1889 or 1890, Day also met the British bookseller turned photographer, Frederick H. Evans. Evans not only involved Day in the British photography scene but also got him interested in the powerful and stylized drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, then still a teenager. Day and Evans had much in common—books, art, photography and a fascination with visionaries, and they remained close friends, exchanging photographs and ideas, for the rest of their lives. Day's increasing links with the British photographic scene, through Evans and George Davison and the growing confidence and excellence of his own photography meant that he was elected to the British photographic society, the Brotherhood of The Linked Ring, on 26 November 1895. By this time, Day had begun to use the name F. Holland Day for his photography, finding it more appropriate to his status as an artist than the colloquial "Fred". From 1893 to 1899,
Day set up and self-financed a publishing house with the writer and
editor Herbert Copeland. The publishing company of Copeland and Day,
based in Boston, was initially much influenced by the ethos and style
of William Morris's Kelmscott Press (set up in 1891) and the resurgent
Arts and Crafts movement in Europe and the United States. Copeland and
Day never made a profit during its six years of operation but produced
almost a hundred courageously and beautifully designed and printed books,
gaining notoriety (and much needed sales) by publishing the American
edition of Wilde's Salome, illustrated with Beardsley drawings (1894),
and a journal, The Yellow Book (1894-1896), again illustrated by Beardsley
until 1895. Day's photography blossomed astonishingly rapidly in the 1890s. He photographed his friends and colleagues, initially concentrating on portraits of women, often using a sepia-toned printing-out paper. He also began to photograph a variety of exotic female, and then male, models, dressing them in flowing draperies and with props of Middle Eastern, African, or Greek inspiration. The years 1896-1897, when he had established himself in a new rented studio at 9 Pinckney Street in Boston, were seminal in his development as a photographer. He began to photograph male nudes or partially draped figures, often using black models of supreme grace and beauty (the most notable being J. Alexandre Skeete, a professional model and an aspiring artist himself). He did so with a control of light and shadow on skin tones, and a placement of his subjects in an artistic and allegorical metier, that rendered them on the aesthetically acceptable side of the erotic. The models featured in such photographs as "Ebony and Ivory", "An Ethiopian", "Menelek", "Nubia", and "Smoker", was variously accessorized with an ivory (actually plaster) statuette, body jewellery, robes, pigeon-wing head-dress, leopard skin, bows and spear—all the accoutrements of an imagined exoticism. These photographs were much exhibited, much reviewed, and much discussed. Day trod a very fine line between homoeroticism and the depiction of the male body as a "Greek" ideal. While the photographs in this series have an undoubted erotic and sensual charge, they were not taken, unlike the photographs of Day's contemporary Baron von Gloeden, solely with the male viewer in mind . Day defended his ideals with consummate skill in public lectures and in articles in both the national and photographic press. For instance, in an article of July 1898 ("Art and the Camera", published in Stieglitz's journal Camera Notes), Day outlined his criteria for producing art with the camera, observing that "Boticelli's circle was not made with a compass, neither is art produced by the lens and bellows". He advised his audience "to read absolutely nothing relative to the technical production of photographs" but to "Become a student and lover of art, if you would produce it". From July to September 1898 Day, although seemingly holding no strong beliefs in any organized religion himself, began to work in earnest on a series of 250 negatives of sacred subjects depicting the events around the Crucifixion in an attempt to use the camera to produce religious art (much as Julia Margaret Cameron had done with her Madonna series of 1864-1865). His first foray into this controversial territory in 1896, "The Entombment", had shown Day himself as Christ, prostrate with painted wounds and a cardboard halo at a rakish angle. As his first recorded self-portrait, it was an astonishingly bold choice. It became obvious to the photographic world that Day was not only a man who took calculated risks but was able to carry them off with undeniable photographic expertise and aesthetic judgement. These ideas were to culminate in the final photographs in the Crucifixion series, "The Seven Words", a set of self-portraits as the dying Christ. The visual style of the Crucifixion work was also strongly influenced by the passion plays of Oberammergau (which Day had seen on a trip to Bavaria in 1890), as well as by his knowledge of Renaissance art, his reading of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne and the rites of the Rosicrucian sect, which performed ritualistic crucifixion ceremonies. The outdoor Crucifixion scenes were photographed near Day's home in Norwood, himself as a suitably emaciated Christ figure. The extras—Roman soldiers, weeping women, onlookers—were friends and hired actors. The meticulous attention to authentic detail, such as a crown of thorns and cedar wood imported from Lebanon for the cross, has been well documented elsewhere in publications by Jussim, Crump, and Curtis (see Further Reading). The close-up portraits, "The Seven Words", taken at Day's Norwood family home, used a mirror attached to the camera and a long shutter release cable to achieve the correct facial expressions. In an identification fashionable at the time, Day doubtless saw the crucified Jesus as a symbol for the suffering and misunderstood artist—and especially aesthetes such as Keats, Wilde, Beardsley, and Day himself. The photographs aroused initial controversy, tempered by eventual praise. A private showing to members of various religious groupings in Day's studio received a remarkably open reception. To this exhibition there came people of all shades of religious belief - Quakers, Jews, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics, Nonconformists, Swedenborgian, priest and clergymen. Among them many were known to hold adverse opinions before seeing the prints, but with the exception of a single individual, those prejudices entirely disappeared. (Day, "Sacred Art and the Camera", Photogram, 6 (1899): 97-99) Day's profile in Boston, and in American art photography circles, was high. In 1899, he worked with the wealthy Boston painter and photographer Sarah Choate Sears to secure a permanent gallery space for photography at the city's Museum of Fine Arts. This was intended to act as a photographic salon for exhibitions of the pictorial photography of a much discussed but eventually unrealized grouping of Boston artist photographers, to be named the American Association of Artistic photography, based along the lines of the Linked Ring. Despite the failure of this idea in Boston Day decided to press ahead and arrange an exhibition in London. In April 1900 he sailed to London with several hundred photographs by over forty American pictorial photographers, among them Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, a distant cousin of Day's, Gertrude Kasebier, and Clarence White. In October 1900, the exhibition of The New School of American Photography opened at the London headquarters of the Royal Photographic Society, after his request to show it at the annual Linked Ring Salon was refused thanks to a last-minute intervention by Stieglitz. The exhibition was a succès de scandale. Day showed 113 of his own photographs and his subject matter—naked black men and religious scenes—and his elaborate methods of presenting his photographs on multi-layered coloured paper supports in ornate gold and wooden frames, were unlike anything seen in a photographic exhibition in London before. Reviews in the photographic press veered between vitriolic sarcasm and heady praise. The photographs, most especially the contributions of the 21-year-old Edward Steichen, shocked London to the core. Day's diplomatic skills, determined conviction and personal charisma won him a wide circle of admirers, while his personal appearance—brocade waistcoats, swirling capes, auxiliary wardrobe of Oriental and Middle Eastern attire, and stylishly coiffed hair—declared him to be an exotic aesthete in the tradition of the now disgraced Oscar Wilde. Like Wilde, Day believed that publicity, be it good or bad, was better than apathy and silence. In December 1900, just a few days after Wilde died in Paris, Day and his controversial exhibition arrived there. The French reception of The New School of American Photography, which showed at the Photo-Club de Paris from February to March 1901 and was championed by the influential Robert Demachy, was this time wholly favourable. Back in Boston later in 1901, Day threw himself into re-establishing his ties to his roots. He also began to spend more time and money mentoring and educating young immigrant boys, funding them through school, art and literature classes and teaching them photography. An earlier protégé and photographic model of 1896, a 13 year old Lebanese immigrant called Kahlil Gibran, was blossoming into a poet, author, and artist thanks to Day's guidance (Gibran's book The Prophet, published in 1923, now enjoys cult status). In 1901, Alfred Stieglitz finally established his own coterie of American pictorial photographers, the Photo-Secession, firmly rooted in his native New York. Two years later he launched Camera Work, probably the most beautiful, lavish, radical and opinionated photography journal ever published. Day had lost the chance to be the front-runner in American photography but, eventually, seems not to have cared unduly, perhaps glad to hand over the baton to a more energetic and single-minded participant. In 1904 Day's new studio in the Harcourt Building in Irvington Street burnt down. He lost much of his previous life in photography; 2000 negatives taken over the previous 18 years, an unknown number of prints, his collection of photographs by friends, and his cameras. The fire also destroyed some of his art collection, antiques, and books. In many ways, the fire and destruction seem to have acted as a cleansing and liberating process; from 1905 onwards Day's photography was quite different. Shot through with openness, freshness, liberation and freedom, frankness and honesty, humour and joy, it became astonishingly modern. For the rest of his active photographic career until 1912, he concentrated on marrying a celebration of nature with a celebration of the naked male body and also began to explore portraiture of close friends from a new and vivid angle. In his forties, Day simplified his life, spending eight months of each year at his property in Maine where he built a house to enable the establishment of a Utopian community where he could entertain friends and organize summer schools for immigrant boys raised in the Boston slums. From 1916 until his death in 1933, Day retired back to his family mansion in Norwood, physically bedbound but still mentally active. Pam Roberts See also Exotic photography, History: 6. 1890s, Nudes, Pictorialism, United States Biography Further Reading More information: Home |