Virginia's Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University) was founded in 1868 to educate freed slave for elementary school teaching and other independent occupations. F. Holland Day, the master photographer from Boston, was an adviser to their distinguished Camera Club, or Kiquotan Kamera Klub, whose name both recognizes the regions's first Native American settlers and mocks the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan. This portrait of a young girl at Hampton's affiliated elementary school conveys a special warmth and human sympathy for the child's hopeful future, despite discrimination in the new urban South.

Like many of the photographers who viewed this medium as fine art, Day belonged to the pictorialist movement. His photographs reflect a composition and theme suggestive of classical sculpture. Day's sexuality was central to his work and life and he was always seen as a controversial artist. While he was hailed as a leading American photographer in his own lifetime, his work has rarely appeared in exhibitions and only a few publications on his work have been completed.

Day co-founded and self-financed the publishing firm of Copeland and Day, which from 1893 through 1899 published about a hundred titles. The firm was influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and William Morris's Kelmscott Press. The firm was the American publisher of Oscar Wilde's Salome, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley; The Yellow Book, also illustrated by Beardsley; and The Black Rider and Other Lines by Stephen Crane.

Medium : Reproductions are made from a scan of an original photographic print

Created/Published : 1905

Creator : Fred Holland Day, photographer, 1864 - 1933

Part of the Louise Imogen Guiney Collection and housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

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Product #: ppmsca13700