ART REVIEW : PHOTOGRAPHY OF F. HOLLAND DAY HAS BEAUTY, FORCE

The exhibition “F. Holland Day and His Circle” now at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park is one of the most beautiful and historically interesting shows initiated and presented there in some time.

Day was a pivotal figure in the development of “pictorial” or “art photography.” Through his organization of a major exhibition for London (1900) and Paris (1901) he garnered international respect for American art photographers that they had never had before.

“At the turn of the century, F. Holland Day became one of the most prolific and skilled workers of his generation,” said Joseph Bellows, curator of the exhibition. “This exhibition sheds light on him as a photographer, publisher and early leader of the pictorial movement. He was the only photographer to successfully challenge Alfred Stieglitz for that title.

“Day and his fellow pictorialists worked with an intense personal vision. They expanded the limits of photography by experimenting with printing techniques and studying the formal elements of art--composition, tone and line--in the works of European master painters like Rembrandt, Titian and Velasquez.”

Despite his achievements, Day enjoyed preeminence only for the decade 1895 to 1905.

His most famous work was a series of 250 photographs, several of which Bellows has included in the exhibition, depicting scenes from the life of Christ, for which Day himself posed.

Even today, these photographs appear blasphemous with their mix of narcissism and masochism. At their initial appearance in 1898, they shocked the international photographic community. But Day made the point that religious subjects were as appropriate for the art of photography as they were for painting and sculpture.

Popular disfavor toward Day’s decadent aestheticism was in part the cause for the obscurity into which he fell after 1905. In our post-Freudian world, we are inclined to read much, perhaps too much, into his penchant for posing in costume, into his predilection for photographing nude boys as Greek shepherds and a black man as an Ethiopian chieftain. Nevertheless, the images are exceptionally beautiful.

More important reasons for the neglect of his work were the destruction of almost all of his prints and negatives when a fire destroyed his Boston studio in 1904, Stieglitz’s determination to dominate the U.S. photography community, and Day’s withdrawal into seclusion until his death in 1933.

Among the photographs exhibited, several showing young women have a transcendent beauty and sense of presence that only an artist of great ability could convey.

His close-up portraits of two black children seem stunningly contemporary. In particular, the “Black Girl with Broad White Collar” (1905) has the authority of an expressionistic abstraction.

Also included in the exhibition are selected photographs by several other artists whom Day influenced, including, Gertrude Kasebier, Frederick H. Evans, Clarence H. White, Edward Steichen and Alvin Langdon Coburn.

The installation is very handsome and, happily, uncrowded. The instructive wall texts are indispensable, because there is no catalogue for this exhibition, which continues through Nov. 30.