Images Re-Vues (Sep 2020)
Admirer en fermant les yeux : la réception critique de l’œuvre de F. Holland Day à Paris en 1901
Abstract
A key figure of the studies dedicated to the homoerotic photograph, American pictorialist F. Holland Day (1864-1933) patiently built a poetic world inhabited by obviously sensual male nudes. Yet, the critical reception of his work by his contemporaries shows no acknowledgment of this sensuality no more than it takes into account his taste for the nude. The “Exhibition of the Work of F. Holland Day and the American New School”, shown in Paris in 1901, reveals the paralysis of the critics when confronted to the unusual eroticism of Day’s nonstandard aesthetic. Despite its obviousness, his constant fascination for the male body is thoroughly ignored. Examining the critical reception of the Parisian exhibition of 1901, this article aims to study the willful blindness of the critics and the way Day’s contemporaries completely overlooked the sensuality and homoeroticism of his photographs to refocus the debate on the more conventional characteristics of his work, thus denying it one of its main specific features.
