Getty Museum

Ebony and Ivory

Date

July 1898

Medium

Photogravure

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

*Ebony and Ivory* depicts J. R. Carter, an African American model from Danville, Virginia, who poses nude on a leopard skin rug. He gazes at a plaster statuette of a Roman god balanced in his hand. The stark white sculpture stands in relief against the dark background, while the Black figure practically merges with the shadows. Critics at the time celebrated Days’ ability to capture a wide range of tones, from the dark skin and even darker background to the pure white of the statuette.Like the statuette, Carter appears to be sitting atop a pedestal covered with a leopard skin. Through his presentation of an ideal of beauty embodied by the Black male nude, the photographer F. Holland Day challenged the Classical Eurocentric ideal of beauty symbolized by the statuette. Scholar Shawn Michelle Smith suggests that, by juxtaposing Carter’s “African” body with the Roman figure, Day also alludes to the idea that Greek culture and Christianity were rooted in Egypt and extended even further back to the Nubians of Ethiopia. Smith also writes that, during a time when nonwhite male and female naked bodies were prominent in scientific photographs and overtly erotic photographs, Day’s work stands out in its aesthetic celebration of the Black male nude and its more subtle homoeroticism. This image was first exhibited at the First Exhibition of the Boston Society of the Arts and Crafts in April 1897. It was later shown in New York; Philadelphia; Newark, Ohio; and again in Boston between 1898 and 1899. It was published as a photogravure in Alfred Stieglitz’s journal [*Camera Notes*](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/33066/) in July 1898. Day photographed other Black models and sitters through his career, including [J. Alexandre Skeete](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/36133/) whom he portrayed as imagined African leaders. Carolyn Peter, J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photographs, 2021.For further information about Day and his photographs of Black men, women, and children see: Fanning, Patricia J. Through An Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008.Jussim, Estelle. “F. Holland Day’s ‘Nubians.’” History of Photography. 7, no. 2 (April-June 1983): 131-42.Michaels, Barbara L. “New Light on F. Holland Day’s Photographs of African Americans.” History of Photography. 18, No. 4 (Winter 1994): 334-347.Smith, Shawn Michelle. “The Politics of Pictorialism: Another Look at F. Holland Day.” In At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen, by Shawn Michelle Smith, 39-71. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.

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