(b Boston, MA, 11 June 1882; d Colwyn Bay, 23 Oct 1966). American photographer, active also in Britain. He was greatly influenced by his mother, a keen amateur photographer, and began taking photographs at the age of eight. He travelled to England in 1899 with his mother and his cousin, F. Holland Day. Coburn developed substantial contacts in the photography world in New York and London, and in 1900 he took part in the New School of American Pictorial Photography exhibition (London, Royal Phot. Soc.), which Day organized. In 1902 he was elected a member of the Photo-Secession, founded by Alfred Stieglitz to raise the standards of pictorial photography. A year later he was elected a member of the Brotherhood of the LINKED RING in Britain.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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Coburn, Alvin Langdon (1882-1966), Boston-born British photographer. A young member of the Photo-Secession group in 1902, Coburn became a key figure in the development of American pictorialism. He travelled widely, living for periods of time in England, and knew and photographed many of its leading personalities, and writers like George Bernard Shaw. Coburn was aware of trends in European art and experimented, for example, with ‘vortographic’ prints, using the ideas of the English-spawned variant of Cubism, Vorticism. An extraordinary technician as well as artist, Coburn created photographic images using gravure, gum, and platinum printing techniques, as well as autochrome. With Clarence White and Gertrude Käsebier, he was a founder in 1915 of the group Pictorial Photographers of America. He eventually settled in Wales and became a Freemason, and effectively gave up photography for a period of nearly 30 years between the 1920s and 1950s. Always a deeply spiritual figure, he explained this with the comment ‘Photography teaches its devotees how to look intelligently and appreciatively at the world, but religious mysticism introduces the soul to God.’

— Tim Troy

Bibliography

• Weaver, W., Alvin Langdon Coburn, Symbolist Photographer: Beyond the Craft (1986)

(kō'bûrn) , 1882–1936, American photographer, b. Boston. Coburn began making photographs at eight and was one of the younger members of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession. Like others in the group, he was inspired to photograph the streets, parks, and buildings of New York City. He later became renowned for his thoughtful, perceptive portraits of European literary and artistic celebrities. Living and working in England most of his life, he produced superb photogravures of urban and marine scenes and landscapes that were widely published and exhibited. He experimented with a cubist aesthetic in his vortographs.

Bibliography

See his autobiography (1966) and study by M. Weaver (1986).

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