Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 1882-1966

Person

Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 1882-1966

Alvin Langdon Coburn (1889-1966) was an influential and innovative photographer, who is regarded by many as the father of abstract photography. He also attained notoriety for his extensive portraiture studies of prominent contemporary literary and political figures, and for his landscape and cityscape studies, especially those of London and New York. Coburn was born into a middle class Massachusetts family on 11 June 1882 at Boston. In 1899, he accompanied his distant cousin, the photographer Fred Holland Day (1864-1933), to London in order to help with the hanging of an exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society. In 1901 he returned to America where he opened his first studio on Fifth Avenue in New York, and, at the beginning of 1903, held his first solo exhibition at the Camera Club in New York. In 1904 he once more travelled to London where he befriended, and photographed, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). Shaw was influential in arranging other notable sitters for his friend, and over the next few years Coburn went on to photograph many great men of literature, including the American writer Henry James (1843-1916). 1906 saw an important one-man exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society of London, to which he was later invited to become a member, and in 1909 he set up his own press and studio at Hammersmith from where he produced high quality photogravures of his work. In 1912 Coburn married Edith Wightman Clement at Trinity Church, New York. In 1913 Coburn published the first of his famous collections of portraits under the title Men of Mark. This would be followed by a companion volume called More Men of Mark in 1922. In 1916 a new chapter in his career began when he developed a kaleidoscopic device of prisms and mirrors that he fitted to a lens, so as to produce what are regarded as the first truly abstract photographs. He christened his invention the Vortoscope, and the resultant pictures he termed Vortographs. Between 1914 and 1921 he complied a portfolio of thirty-three portraits of famous composers and musicians which he intended to be published as a third volume, but which never came to fruition. Coburn's association with Wales began in 1916 when he visited Harlech, Merionethshire, at the invitation of his close friend George Davison (1854-1930), Managing Director of Kodak Limited in Britain. Two years later he bought a plot of land upon which he built a small house, calling it 'Cae Besi'. After the publication of The Book of Harlech in 1920, for which he provided both illustrations and text, he began to become less actively involved in photography, though in 1924 he mounted another solo exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society. It was during this period that Coburn started to turn more and more to esoteric groups in search of spiritual fulfilment. He joined the Theosophical Society in 1919, and shortly afterwards became initiated as a freemason, and, around 1920, he joined a British comparative religious group called The Universal Order. His deep interest in mysticism, and especially freemasonry, was to occupy the greatest part of the remainder of his life. Coburn did much research into the history of freemasonry, as well as on aspects of the occult and mysticism. He presented numerous lectures based on his findings to Masonic gatherings, travelling extensively throughout England and Wales. He also took a particular interest in the ceremonial rituals and rites performed, and in their origins and symbolism. He attained high office within several different orders, becoming the Inspector General, Thirty-third Degree, for North Wales of The Ancient and Accepted Rite in 1946 as well as the Provincial Grand Master of the Mark Degree for North Wales in 1952. 1927 saw Coburn made an honorary Ovate of the Gorsedd, being accepted into the order at the 1929 Eisteddfod held in Liverpool, and where he took the bardic name 'Mab-y-Trioedd' (Son of the Triads). In 1931 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, to which he had donated his large collection of photographs and associated material the previous year. In May 1932 he became a naturalised British subject. He left Harlech in 1945 and moved to Rhos-on-Sea, Denbighshire, mainly because of his wife's failing health. His beloved Edith died on 11 October 1957. In 1962 the most comprehensive exhibition of his work took place at the University of Reading, and in 1966, as well as the publication of his autobiography, his last solo exhibition took place at Colwyn Bay Library. Coburn died only thirteen days after the opening of this final exhibition on 23 November 1966.