I may have waxed lyrical on the hazy, dreamlike qualities of F. Holland Day’s beautiful outdoor nudes before, and I know many of you must prefer clarity over atmosphere, yet I cannot help once more admiring the grainy, glowing softness in these turn of the century pictures which gives them such enduring charm.
Presented as a triptych of three images mounted on board, this glowingly gorgeous dreamlike photograph was taken by F. Holland Day in 1909. It is well worth a few seconds of your time to linger here but a moment, and view this at full size.
Nude with Trumpet, taken by Fred Holland Day (1897).
Typical of the extraordinarily lovely scenes composed by F. Holland Day, a young man of truly admirable form sits with easy grace in the raking light, every countour exaggerated by the brightness and deep shadowh, his modesty preserved with a slim ribbon spilling across one thigh. Many of Day’s photographs feature the addition of these distinctive and unusual borders of varying shape; most can never be found in their original full-page format.
A beautiful photograph with a rather unwieldy title, Nude young man on boulder with tortoises and shepherd’s crook, a typically soft-focus, otherworldly image by F. Holland Day, 1905. (It is unsurprisingly not often I am able to include reptiles in posts here, this picture reminds me of how I adored Gerald Durrell’s books of a lovely lazy outdoor life with the native wild creatures, and wanted to be just like him.)