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.
As the archivist at the Norwood Historical Society, housed in Day’s manorial family home, Fanning has an intimate knowledge of Day’s papers and possessions. In many ways, this makes her Day’s ideal biographer, able to call on a full range of letters, diaries, documents, and photographs to interpret and illustrate aspects of his personal and professional life. Although the book hems and haws at acknowledging Day’s sexuality, finally making the unfortunate decision to ignore it almost completely, the graceful, fact-filled writing makes Through an Uncommon Lens a pleasure to read and a significant contribution to Day scholarship.
Fanning is at her strongest when depicting how early influences shaped Day’s life. Born into a wealthy family living near Boston, Fred Day never had to work for a living and spent a lifetime studying what he liked. His sensibilities were grounded in an upbringing by religiously progressive parents who were dedicated to racial equality, generosity, and the Unitarian doctrine of good works. Feeling at odds with the late 19th-century cult of masculinity and suffering from a sense of personal and intellectual isolation, Day threw himself into cultural groups that valued reading, writing, book collecting, photography, and other artistic pursuits. Fanning wipes away any misconception that Day was a dilettante or a self-centered artiste, however. She also highlights his lifelong commitment to philanthropic pursuits, which included working with children of all ethnicities from the Boston slums, including a young man named Kahlil Gibran.
Artistically, Day was driven by the emerging Arts and Crafts movement. His early social circle included, among others, architect Ralph Adams Cram, designer Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, lifelong friend and well-published Catholic poet Louise Imogen Guiney, and publisher Herbert Copeland, who joined him in the 1890’s to form the publishing firm of Copeland & Day. The company’s books—among them works by Walter Pater, Gelett Burgess, Stephen Crane, Oscar Wilde, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Butler Yeats—were highly respected examples of Arts and Crafts printing and binding. Fanning connects the Arts and Crafts movement’s rejection of the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization to Day’s spiritual quest—he studied a variety of religions and quasi-religious movements—and the Arcadian aspects of his later photographs.
It was his photography that ultimately made Day’s reputation. His growing interest in photography, which he saw as a fine art equivalent to painting, contributed to the slow demise of Copeland & Day. In 1898, he produced his best-known series, a 250-print re-enactment of the Crucifixion, which featured authentic props and costumes and Day in the role of Jesus Christ. At around this time, Day began to nurture the budding careers of Eduard Steichen and Alvin Langdon Coburn, among a host of other photographers that he included in the New School of American Photography, a revolutionary exhibit mounted in 1900. However, politicking within the photographic community would later bring Day into conflict with Alfred Stieglitz, whose disdain for Day undoubtedly contributed to the latter’s subsequent critical neglect. At any rate, Day gradually withdrew from exhibiting his work, especially after the loss of many of his early prints in a devastating studio fire in 1904.
One of the major contributions of Through an Uncommon Lens is Fanning’s solid research identifying models for Day’s pictures. Most were unknown even as of their reproduction in James Crump’s Suffering the Ideal (1995), but Fanning has tracked down information about many of Day’s sitters, from the children in his early portraits to the black models who sat for Day’s 1890’s “Nubian” photographs. The pieces of biography that she inserts help provide context and deeply enrich the impact of the photographs.
In a book with so much going for it, Fanning’s hesitancy regarding Day’s sexuality is disappointing. True, she brings new information to light about Jack Bemis, a friend with whom the young Day was obviously smitten, and about Thomas Langryl Harris, an artist of uncertain origin and questionable ethics whose career Day attempted to assist and whom Day photographed nude, notably for a picture later informally called “Study for the Crucifixion.” But Day’s obsession with characters understood by early 20th-century gay audiences as homosexual martyr figures—Christ, Orpheus, and St. Sebastian—goes unremarked. In discussing Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy (1888), a key text for Day, Fanning notices its connection to socialism but misses its support for same-sex love and its references to Christ as a Uranian martyr. Also unmentioned is Day’s role in getting bookseller Charles Goodspeed to bind and sell copies of Carpenter’s Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship (1902), colloquially known as “The Bugger’s Bible.” The idea that the only motivation for Day’s nude studies from the early 1900’s was a desire to return to Arcadia is presented uncritically, while discussion of Day’s sexuality is dismissed as “prurient speculation.” Fanning admits only to a “perceived homoeroticism” in his photographs of nude male teenagers.
Through an Uncommon Lens is an impressive piece of research. However, it fails to do justice to the nuances of F. Holland Day’s emotional life and the haunting photographs, many with homoerotic themes, that he left behind. These lacunae call for a continuation of scholarship into Day’s fascinating life and work.
Philip Clark, an editor and writer based in Washington, D.C., has written a thesis about religion and homosexuality in F. Holland Day’s photography.
