American photographer Fred Holland Day was BOTD in 1864. Born in Boston, Massachusetts to a wealthy mercantile family, he was relieved of the need to work for a living, pursuing the life of an artist and aesthete. An early enthusiast of photography as an art form, he shocked polite society by photographing male nudes, posed in the Greco-Roman style made popular by German photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden. In 1893, Day co-founded and financed the printing press Copeland & Day, publishing the first American editions of Aubrey Beardsley‘s literary periodical The Yellow Book, Oscar Wilde‘s play Salomé with illustrations by Beardsley and Stephen Crane‘s poetry collection The Black Riders and Other Lines. After attending the Oberammergau Passion Play in Germany, Day created a sequence of self-portraits of himself as Jesus Christ, wearing a crown of thorns and hanging nude from a crucifix, surrounded by beefy Roman soldiers in loincloths. Exhibited in 1898 as The Seven Last Words, Day’s homoerotic presentation of Christianity caused a national scandal, making him internationally famous. In 1900, over 100 of his photographs were included in the New School of American Photography exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society in London. Condemned by conservative critics as the work of “a diseased imagination”, his work attracted praise from gay writer Edward Carpenter, who later posed for a (clothed) portrait. Four years later, his career was devastated when thousands of his photos and negatives were lost in a fire. In his spare time, Day undertook extensive charity work in the slums of Boston, tutoring immigrant children and mentoring a series of boys and young men. One of his protégés, a 13 year-old Lebanese immigrant named Kahlil Gibran, grew up to become the internationally celebrated author of The Prophet. In 1907, Day befriended a teenaged Italian immigrant known as Nardo, who posed nude for a series of Greco-Roman inspired photographs. Their friendship lasted for several years, with Day paying for Nardo to learn English, bankrolling him through art school and introducing him to prospective employers. As Nardo became older, their correspondence became more sinister, as he attempted to blackmail Day to help finance his marriage plans. Largely forgotten by the end of World War One as Modernism dominated the art world, Day died in 1933, aged 69. His work was rediscovered in the 1990s, with retrospectives at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Royal Photographic Society, and the publication of three major biographies.