F. Holland Day
1900
James Craig Annan

Platinum process / platinotype
National Science and Media Museum
The Royal Photographic Society Collection, Inventory no: 2003-5001/2/20823
 
A Pictorialist photographer and member of the Linked Ring Brotherhood, James Craig Annan (1864 - 1946) was the son of the successful Scottish professional photographer, Thomas Annan (1829 - 1887). He studied chemistry at Anderson's College in Glasgow from 1878 - 1879. He worked in the family's photography firm. He travelled to Vienna in 1883 and was taught the process of photogravure by Karl Klíc. Annan made photogravures from calotypes of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson; c. 1891 he moved onto portrait photography, photographing Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Ellen Terry and George Bernard Shaw.
 
Born in Boston Massachusetts, Fred Holland Day (1864 - 1933) was a prominent American photographer and his lifelong passions were literature, art, photography and aesthetics. He first trained as a painter; co-founded and self-financed the publishing firm of Copeland and Day (1893 - 1899); took up photography in 1887; regularly travelled to London and established links with the British photographic scene, joining the Linked Ring in 1896. By the 1890s Day had become one of the undisputed leaders of the American art photography movement. A millionaire book publisher and aesthete, he was a friend of Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900) and Aubrey Beardsley (1872 - 1898). In 1900 Day organised a photographic exhibition 'The New School of American Photography' which was shown in London and created a sensation. He ceased taking photographs around 1915.
 
LL/51614