390
of Wilde’s Salome, illustrated with Beardsley drawings
(1894), and a journal, The Yellow Book (1894–1896),
again illustrated by Beardsley until 1895.
By the time the publishing house closed in 1899, Day
had already taken on a new role as one of the undisputed
leaders, along with the New-York based Alfred Stieglitz,
of the American art photography movement. Both men
realized that in order to establish photography as an art
form in an era before the widespread proliferation of
galleries devoted solely to photography, images had to
be supported by lectures, articles, interviews, and exhibi-
tions, and by encouraging mutually supportive groups of
like-minded individuals. An eventual stand-off between
Day, who disliked New York and avoided visiting the
city at all costs, and Stieglitz, who felt much the same
about Boston, was inevitable.
Day’s photography blossomed astonishingly rapidly
in the 1890s. He photographed his friends and col-
leagues, 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 fl owing draperies
and with props of Middle Eastern, African, or Greek
inspiration. The years 1896–1897, when he had es-
tablished 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 fi gures, often using black models
of supreme grace and beauty (the most notable be-
ing 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 jewel-
lery, robes, pigeon-wing head-dress, leopard skin,
bows and spear—all the accoutrements of an imagined
exoticism.
These photographs were much exhibited, much re-
viewed, and much discussed. Day trod a very fi ne 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 consum-
mate 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
three rules 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” but by
the artist using the lens and bellows in the eye, the heart,
and the brain respectively.
From July to September 1898 Day, although seem-
ingly holding no strong beliefs in any organized reli-
gion himself, began to work in earnest on a series of
250 negatives of sacred subjects depicting the events
around the Crucifi xion in an attempt to use the camera
to produce religious art (much as Julia Margaret Cam-
eron had done with her Madonna series of 1864–1865).
His fi rst 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 fi rst 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 judge-
ment. These ideas were to culminate in the fi nal photo-
graphs in the Crucifi xion series, “The Seven Words,” a
set of self-portraits as the dying Christ. The visual style
of the Crucifi xion work was also strongly infl uenced
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
crucifi xion ceremonies.
The outdoor Crucifi xion scenes were photographed
near Day’s home in Norwood—Roman soldiers, weep-
ing 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 identifi cation fashionable at the time, Day
doubtless saw the crucifi ed Jesus as a symbol for the
suffering and misunderstood artist—and especially aes-
thetes 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,” Photo-
gram, 6 (1899): 97–99)