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Lot Essay
It was in January 1917 that I created these first purely abstract photographs.
Alvin Langdon Coburn
Coburn created his ‘Vortographs’, as he dubbed his radical 1917 series of abstract photographic experiments, in the context of an invitation to present a one-man show at London’s Camera Club. He accepted, ‘on condition that I could hang whatever I liked. This was granted,’ he explains, ‘and the exhibition consisted of thirteen of my paintings and eighteen Vortographs.’ There is no record of the paintings, but his Vortographs have become widely recognized as remarkable innovative experiments in the use of photography to question the inherent mystery of the medium itself.
Referencing comments made by his poet friend Ezra Pound in an uncredited introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Coburn quoted him as explaining how ‘The Vortoscope freed photography from material limitations of depicting recognizable natural objects. By its use the photographer can create beautiful arrangements of form for their own sake, just as a musician does.’ The Vortoscope was a small, prism-like chamber of mirrors allowing seemingly infinite reflections. Objects of simple, geometric form, some transparent or reflective, lose their materiality when photographed within this seemingly floating space and become a pure play of light and structure. Coburn was sculpting with light and exploring the ambiguities of the image plane several years before the experiments of Schad, Man Ray, or Moholy-Nagy.
These photographic experiments reference in their generic title Coburn’s close association with a small group of artists who came together in 1914 as the Vorticists, the name suggested by Pound in 1913. The group, with artist Wyndham Lewis as their most high-profile advocate, introduced dynamic avant-garde European ideas into the British art scene. Their jagged, cubistic, fragmented abstract motifs anticipated in paint or print the visionary pictures made in 1917 by Coburn through the agency of light and photo-chemistry.
Another print of this image is in the collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art.
Alvin Langdon Coburn
Coburn created his ‘Vortographs’, as he dubbed his radical 1917 series of abstract photographic experiments, in the context of an invitation to present a one-man show at London’s Camera Club. He accepted, ‘on condition that I could hang whatever I liked. This was granted,’ he explains, ‘and the exhibition consisted of thirteen of my paintings and eighteen Vortographs.’ There is no record of the paintings, but his Vortographs have become widely recognized as remarkable innovative experiments in the use of photography to question the inherent mystery of the medium itself.
Referencing comments made by his poet friend Ezra Pound in an uncredited introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Coburn quoted him as explaining how ‘The Vortoscope freed photography from material limitations of depicting recognizable natural objects. By its use the photographer can create beautiful arrangements of form for their own sake, just as a musician does.’ The Vortoscope was a small, prism-like chamber of mirrors allowing seemingly infinite reflections. Objects of simple, geometric form, some transparent or reflective, lose their materiality when photographed within this seemingly floating space and become a pure play of light and structure. Coburn was sculpting with light and exploring the ambiguities of the image plane several years before the experiments of Schad, Man Ray, or Moholy-Nagy.
These photographic experiments reference in their generic title Coburn’s close association with a small group of artists who came together in 1914 as the Vorticists, the name suggested by Pound in 1913. The group, with artist Wyndham Lewis as their most high-profile advocate, introduced dynamic avant-garde European ideas into the British art scene. Their jagged, cubistic, fragmented abstract motifs anticipated in paint or print the visionary pictures made in 1917 by Coburn through the agency of light and photo-chemistry.
Another print of this image is in the collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art.