F. Holland Day, Little Good Harbor, Maine, c.1900-1910
For the past six months, I have become completely immersed in the world of cyanotypes. Perhaps my biggest project this summer was creating scaled-to-size images for the maquette of the exhibition. To do this, I took the size of the photographs in the exhibition, their mattes, and their frames and resized them so that 3/4 of an inch was equal to one foot. The curators then positioned these images on the maquette as a way of visualizing the exhibition layout. This work, in addition to the research I did and the meetings I attended this summer, gave me a greater idea of the planning that goes into an exhibition.
Since then, I have devoted most of my time to learning about F. Holland Day and the small harbor in Maine that he called his second home. In addition to scouring through written text to learn more about this pictorialist photographer, I also took a trip to Norwood, Massachusetts to see where he grew up. I was given a tour of his home by Patricia J. Fanning, who also wrote the book, Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day. As her book has been one of my most valuable resources, seeing Day's home through her eyes provided me with a fabulous experience: Fanning's text and Day's photographs came to life before me. Although I have not been able to see his second home in Little Good Harbor, through research I have begun to uncover what this setting means to Day, and why it was so important that he captured it in blue.
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