Making a Presence: F. Holland Day in Artistic Photography

Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass.

Through July 31

Eat your heart out, Cindy Sherman, said Richard Hawkins in Artforum.com. Nearly a century before Sherman began her long career of role-playing for the benefit of her own camera, F. Holland Day (1864–1933) was busy establishing himself as one of history’s “more curious examples of the artist-as-his-own-affected-subject.” A wealthy Boston publisher, Day apparently delighted in masquerade, dressing in medieval garb, in Algerian robes—even casting himself as Jesus in an 1898 photo series that re-creates the Crucifixion. In part, this was Day’s way of championing photography as an art form on par with classical painting, said Ed Beem in Yankee.com. But the man himself intrigues. One of the last images in this show at Phillips Academy in Andover is another photographer’s 1913 portrait of Day “staring off into space and looking haunted.” He’s wearing a sailor’s suit and smoking a cigar.

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He was a character actor who never disappeared into his characters, said Mark Feeney in The Boston Globe. Even when he donned an oversize black coat and beret to mimic Rembrandt in a 1901 photo taken by his friend Edward Steichen, “Day was always Day,” projecting his own eccentricity. He became known for his nude portraits of other male subjects, and “there’s no missing the homoeroticism” in much of his work, even in the close-ups of his face in his portrayals of Jesus. But “no matter how often Day flirts unawares with the absurd,” there remains in these photographs “a charming naïveté” that suggests Day was more Peter Pan than narcissist or provocateur. We can easily imagine that he considered himself primarily “an evangelist for beauty and photography.” He didn’t understand how others would see him.