Alvin Langdon Coburn (Q63190)

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 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. 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. 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.