F. Holland Day’s Seven Last Words and the Religious Roots of American Modernism / Schwain, Kristin

Schwain, Kristin, «F. Holland Day’s Seven Last Words and the Religious Roots of American Modernism». American Art, 19,  1, (2005), pp. 32-59

Abstract
In the summer of 1898, the photographer F. Holland Day and a coterie of friends and professional models ascended a hill outside Boston to perform Christ’s life, death, and resurrection for the camera. Selected for their presumed resemblance to the biblical figures, dressed in costumes with designs ”furnished by archeological investigation,” and fastened to crosses ”in the same manner as the Christ was supported in the Oberammergau Passion Play,” the participants helped Day produce over 250 studies – with the artist himself playing the role of Christ. The series prompted extensive discussion in the United States and Europe, despite the fact that his selection of religious subject matter was not unprecedented and a number of prominent photographers used religious language to express the photograph’s ability to transcend the material world. This essay explores the terms of the vague but tenacious relationship between photography and religion at the end of the nineteenth century, and more specifically, calls attention to religion’s influence on modernist conceptions of art. It suggests that Day’s sacred series helped establish protocols of engaged spectatorship that underscored the formation of modern aesthetic theory in the first decades of the twentieth century; in short, the ways of seeing he espoused paralleled the spiritualized viewing experience later codified by Stieglitz and others as particularly ”modern.”

Other data

ISSN: 1073-9300
DOI: 10.1086/429974
URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/429974
Language: EN
key: LYRK6K8L