F. Holland Day
Encyclopedia
,_1907.jpg)
_-_edward_carpenter.jpg)
Life
Day was the son of a Boston merchant, and was a man of independent means for all his life. He first trained as a painter.Day's life and works had long been controversial, since his photographic subjects were often nude male youths. Pam Roberts, in F. Holland Day (Waanders Pub, 2001; catalog of a Day exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum
Van Gogh Museum
The Van Gogh Museum is an art museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, featuring the works of the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries. It has the largest collection of Van Gogh's paintings and drawings in the world.-Background:...
) writes: "Day never married and his sexual orientation, whilst it is widely assumed that he was homosexual, because of his interests, his photographic subject matter, his general flamboyant demeanor, was, like much else about him, a very private matter."
Day spent much time among poor immigrant children in Boston, tutoring them in reading and mentoring them. One in particular, the 13-year-old Lebanese immigrant Kahlil Gibran, went on to fame as the author of The Prophet
The Prophet (book)
The Prophet is a book of 26 poetic essays written in English by the Lebanese artist, philosopher and writer Kahlil Gibran. It was originally published in 1923 by Alfred A. Knopf. It is Gibran's best known work...
.
Day co-founded and self-financed the publishing firm of Copeland and Day, which from 1893 through 1899 published about a hundred titles. The firm was influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement
Arts and Crafts movement
Arts and Crafts was an international design philosophy that originated in England and flourished between 1860 and 1910 , continuing its influence until the 1930s...
and William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
's Kelmscott Press. The firm was the American publisher of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
's Salomé
Salome (play)
Salome is a tragedy by Oscar Wilde.The original 1891 version of the play was in French. Three years later an English translation was published...
, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His drawings, done in black ink and influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A....
; The Yellow Book periodical, also illustrated by Beardsley; and The Black Riders and Other Lines
The Black Riders and Other Lines
The Black Riders and Other Lines is a book of poetry written by American author Stephen Crane . First published in 1895 by Copeland and Day, it was Crane's second published volume, following Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and predating The Red Badge of Courage...
by Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane was an American novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism...
.
He is known to have traveled. Beaumont Newhall states that he visited Algiers
Algiers
' is the capital and largest city of Algeria. According to the 1998 census, the population of the city proper was 1,519,570 and that of the urban agglomeration was 2,135,630. In 2009, the population was about 3,500,000...
, possibly as a result of reading Wilde and Gide. There is a photo "Portrait of F. Holland Day in Arab Costume, 1901" by Frederick H. Evans
Frederick H. Evans
Frederick H. Evans was a noted British photographer, primarily of architectural subjects. He is best known for his images of English and French cathedrals. Evans began his career as a bookseller, but retired from that to become a full-time photographer in 1898, when he adopted the platinotype...
.
He was a friend of Louise Imogen Guiney
Louise Imogen Guiney
Louise Imogen Guiney was an American poet, essayist and editor born in Roxbury, Massachusetts.-Biography:...
and Ralph Adams Cram
Ralph Adams Cram
Ralph Adams Cram FAIA, , was a prolific and influential American architect of collegiate and ecclesiastical buildings, often in the Gothic style. Cram & Ferguson and Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson are partnerships in which he worked.-Early life:Cram was born on December 16, 1863 at Hampton Falls, New...
. He was a major patron of Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His drawings, done in black ink and influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A....
.
He was also a lifelong bibliophile and collector. Most notable among his collections was his world-class collection on the poet John Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
.
Work
At the turn of the century, his influence and reputation as a photographer rivaled that of Alfred StieglitzAlfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form...
, who later eclipsed him. The high point of Day's photographic career was probably his organization of an exhibition of photographs at the Royal Photographic Society
Royal Photographic Society
The Royal Photographic Society is the world's oldest national photographic society. It was founded in London, United Kingdom in 1853 as The Photographic Society of London with the objective of promoting the Art and Science of Photography...
in 1900. New School of American Photography presented 375 photographs by 42 photographers, 103 of them by Day, and evoked both high praise and vitriolic scorn from critics. The popularist "Photographic News" saw it as the result... "of a diseased imagination, of which much has been fostered by the ravings of a few lunatics... unacademic ...and eccentric".
Day belonged to the pictorialist
Pictorialism
Pictorialism is the name given to a photographic movement in vogue from around 1885 following the widespread introduction of the dry-plate process. It reached its height in the early years of the 20th century, and declined rapidly after 1914 after the widespread emergence of Modernism...
movement which regarded photography as a fine art and which often included symbolist imagery. The Photo-Secession
Photo-Secession
The Photo-Secession was an early 20th century movement that promoted photography as a fine art in general and photographic pictorialism in particular. A group of photographers, led by Alfred Stieglitz and F...
ists invited him to join, but he declined the offer. As was common at the time, his photographs allude to classical antiquity
Classical antiquity
Classical antiquity is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, collectively known as the Greco-Roman world...
in manner, composition and often in theme. From 1896 through 1898 Day experimented with Christian themes, using himself as a model for Jesus. Neighbors in Norwood, Massachusetts
Norwood, Massachusetts
Norwood is a town and census-designated place in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States. As of the 2010 census, the population was 28,602. The community was named after Norwood, England...
assisted him in an outdoor photographic staged photography re-enactment of the crucifixion of Jesus. This culminated in his series of self-photographs, The Seven Last Words, depicting the seven last words of Christ.
He often made only a single print from a negative. He used only the platinum process
Platinum print
Platinum prints, also called platinotypes, are photographic prints made by a monochrome printing process that provides the greatest tonal range of any printing method using chemical development....
, being unsatisfied with any other, and lost interest in photography when platinum became unobtainable following the Russian Revolution
Russian Revolution of 1917
The Russian Revolution is the collective term for a series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. The Tsar was deposed and replaced by a provisional government in the first revolution of February 1917...
.
Legacy
Day became all but forgotten for a number of reasons. He was eclipsed by his rival, Stieglitz. The pictorial and symbolist photographic style went out of fashion in the face of the radical shift towards early modernismModernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
in the art world. Two thousand of his prints and negatives were lost in a 1904 fire. The few hundred that survived were sent to the Royal Photographic Society in the 1930s.
Since the 1990s Day's works have been included in major exhibitions by museum curators, notably in the solo Day retrospective at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2000/2001 and similar shows at the Royal Photographic Society in England and the Fuller Museum of Art. Art historians are once again taking an interest in Day, and there are now significant academic texts on Day's homoerotic portraiture, and its similarities to the work of Walter Pater
Walter Pater
Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, critic of art and literature, and writer of fiction.-Early life:...
and Thomas Eakins
Thomas Eakins
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator...
.
Day's house at 93 Day Street, Norwood, Massachusetts is now a museum (The F. Holland Day House & Norwood History Museum), and the headquarters of the Norwood Historical Society.
Further reading
- Estelle Jussim. Slave to Beauty: The Eccentric Life and Controversial Career of F. Holland Day (1981).
- Stephen M. Parrish. Currents of the Nineties in Boston and London: Fred Holland Day, Louise Imogen Guiney, and Their Circle (1987).
- James CrumpJames CrumpJames Crump is a curator and writer. He is the author or co-author of numerous books and has published widely in the fields of contemporary art and history of photography.Crump is known internationally for his work with contemporary artists and photographers...
. F. Holland Day: Suffering the Ideal (1995). - F.Holland Day: Selected Texts and Bibliography (1995).
- Samuel Coale et al. New Perspectives on F. Holland Day (1998).
- Patricia Fanning. Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day (2008).
See also
- List of photographers known for portraying males erotically