Alvin Langdon Coburn was born in Boston in 1882, and moved to London in 1899 and became a British citizen. He studied there with Steichen and Robert DeMachy, had his first exhibition with the Linked Brotherhood Ring in 1900, and returned to the united States in 1902. He was well connected to the great photographers of the day and studied with Gertrude Kasebier who encouraged him to study with Arthur Wesley Dow's summer school. There, he received his real grounding in composition which was the underpinning of his future work.

Camera Work, Stieglitz's fine art magazine, published his work from 1903-1909. He also had a one-man show at the Royal Photographic Society in London in 1906. The show made Coburn well known in England and from that time he became a leading figure in the recognition of photography as a fine art. He took many portraits of men and creative shoots of cities and in 1917, he showed the first abstract photographs, which he called "Vortographs."

George Bernard Shaw considered Coburn at twenty-four years old, the greatest photographer in the world. He went through several stages of development that included a seven year stretch where he devoted his life to the Universal Order, a comparative religious group that had begun as the Hermetic Truth Society and the Order of Ancient Wisdom. The photographs he made after 1930 where heavily influenced by the abstract and were similar to the work of Minor White.

Medium : 1 photographic print : platinum

Created/Published : 1905

Creator : Alvin Langdon Coburn, Photographer, 1882 - 1966

Housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

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