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Day’s profi le in Boston, and in American art pho-
tography 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 exhibi-
tions 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 Photo-
graphic 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 succes de scandal. Day showed
113 of his own photographs and his subject mat-
ter—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—de-
clared 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 exhibi-
tion 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 infl uential 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 fi nally established his own
coterie of American pictorial photographers, the Photo-
Secession, fi rmly 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 previ-
ous life in photography; 2,000 negatives taken over the
previous 18 years, an unknown number of prints, his
collection of photographs by friends, and his cameras.
The fi re also destroyed some of his art collection, an-
tiques, and books.
In many ways, the fi re 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 free-
dom, frankness and honesty, humour and joy, it became
astonishingly modern. For the rest of his active photo-
graphic 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 (see the entry
in Fitzroy Dearborn’s Encyclopedia of 20th-Century
Photography).
In his forties, Day simplifi ed 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 orga-
nize 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, physi-
cally bedbound but still mentally active.
Pam Roberts
See also: Evans, Frederick H.; Davison, George;
Brotherhood of The Linked Ring; Stieglitz, Alfred;
Cameron, Julia Margaret; Pictorial Photography;
Steichen, Edward, Coburn, Alvin Langdon; White,
Clarence; Käsebier, Gertrude; Royal Photographic
Society; Photo-Club de Paris; and Demachy,
Robert.Further Reading
Clattenburg, Ellen Fritz, The Photographic Work of F. Holland
Day, Wellesley, Massachusetts: Wellesley College Museum,
1975 (exhibition catalogue).