Published in: May-June 2009 issue.
Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day
by Patricia J. Fanning
University of Massachusetts Press
304 pages, $40.
PIONEERING PHOTOGRAPHER, book publisher, and friend to a generation of artists and writers beginning in the 1890’s, F. Holland Day has not until recently received the respect he deserves. Scholarly essays and theses and a retrospective at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 2000 showed rising interest, but a new book finally does justice to Day’s achievement. Patricia Fanning’s Through an Uncommon Lens is only the second full-length monograph on Day, the first being Estelle Jussim’s fascinating if flawed 1980 book, Slave to Beauty.