Vortograph, abstract photograph made by Alvin Langdon Coburn using a device incorporating three mirrors placed between camera and subject. Eighteen of these Kaleidoscopic images were shown at the London Camera Club in February 1917, causing a furore. The show also created a rift between Coburn and his former ally Frederick Evans. But Coburn had been moving towards abstraction since c.1910; the dizzyingly modern pictures he took from New York skyscrapers in 1912 were influenced by Cubism. In the First World War he encountered the volatile, Cubist- and Futurist-influenced Vorticist movement, and in 1916 made a portrait of one of its leaders, Wyndham Lewis. In a programmatic essay in Photograms of the Year (1916), ‘The Future of Pictorial Photography’, Coburn proposed an exhibition of entirely abstract photographs.
The term ‘Vortograph’ was coined by the poet Ezra Pound. In the catalogue introduction for Coburn's show, he proclaimed: ‘the camera is freed from reality’.
— Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Steinorth, K. (ed.), Alvin Langdon Coburn, Photographien 1900-1924 (1998).
- Christie's, London, Catalogue 6717: Photographs (21 May 2003)
