Alvin Langdon Coburn

British, 1882-1966

Birth LocationUnited States

BiographyAlvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966), an American-born British photographer, was a key figure in the development of American Pictorialism before abandoning its ‘soft effects’ and aesthetic approach to become the maker of the first completely nonobjective photographs, known as Vortographs.

Greatly influenced by his mother, an amateur photographer, and taking his first photographs at age eight with a 4 x 5 Kodak camera given to him by an uncle, Coburn embarked upon his photographic career in 1898 through the encouragement of his cousin, the well-known Pictorialist photographer F. Holland Day. In 1900 Coburn traveled to London as Day’s protégé to assist with The New School of American Pictorial Photography, a landmark exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) that included works by Day and Coburn, as well as leading Pictorialist photographers Gertrude Käsebier (1852–1934) and Clarence H. White (1871–1925). Upon returning to the United States in 1902 Coburn became a member of the Photo-Secession movement founded by Alfred Stieglitz and gained recognition among both British and American Pictorialists for dramatic, masterfully-printed portraits, landscapes and atmospheric views of London and New York that combined Pictorialism’s soft focus with compositions inspired by Japanese design. The following year in 1903, he was elected a member of the Linked Ring, a society of English photographers whose aims to establish photography as a fine art were similar to the American Photo- Secessionists. More major successes followed, including publication in Stieglitz’s Camera Work in 1904 and his first solo exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society in London in 1906. There he gained a reputation for photographing the portraits of celebrities such as George Bernard Shaw, Henry James and the sculptor Auguste Rodin, that were later collected and published in his books, Men of Mark (1913) and More Men of Mark (1922).

Living in England, in 1912 Coburn became interested in European modern art and sought to translate its aesthetic principles into his photography in order to illustrate the dynamism of the modern world. Responding to the British avant-garde writers and painting movement known as Vorticism and its reliance upon a pictorial vocabulary that combined the geometrical fragmentation of Cubism with Futurist-style machine-like imagery, in 1916-1917 Coburn developed a mirrored device for his camera lens that fractured the physical image into geometric shapes and light values. These influential works, which he called Vortographs, are considered to be the first intentionally abstract photographs.

Upon moving to northern Wales in 1919 and becoming increasingly immersed in Freemasonry, Christianity and Zen Buddhism, Coburn's photographic practice lessened. He was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1931 and became a British citizen in 1933.

Over the last several decades, Coburn has been the subject of two major traveling retrospectives through the efforts of The George Eastman Museum, which owns Coburn’s photographic estate and the largest collection of his works. The first retrospective occurred in 1986 and traveled to the Cleveland Museum of Art and International Center of Photography (1986-87). Subsequently, in 2014-15 the Eastman Museum mounted a second retrospective in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, that was accompanied by a major, scholarly publication.

Coburn’s photographs can be found in numerous museum collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Tate Britain, London; Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; and J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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