Clarence H. White
1909
Alvin Langdon Coburn

Platinum process / platinotype
National Science and Media Museum
The Royal Photographic Society Collection, Inventory no: 2003-5001/2/21743
 
This photograph was acquired from Alvin Langdon Coburn.
 
Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882 - 1966) first exhibited in London with the RPS in 1900. After studying in Paris, Coburn returned to his native America in 1902, where he opened a studio in New York. Between 1903 and 1909 many of his works were published in the journal 'Camera Work'. Coburn's impressionistic images were heavily influenced by the Linked Ring Brotherhood. In 1917 he pioneered vortographs, an abstract work produced using mirrors in a vortoscope, rather like a kaleidoscope. In 1930 he moved from the USA, to Harlech in north Wales and was naturalized as a British citizen in 1932. From 1923 to 1930 Coburn became completely devoted to the life of the Universal Order: a comparative religious group that had begun in 1911 as the Hermetic Truth Society and the Order of Ancient Wisdom. Coburn became an elected member of the RPS in 1907; admitted FRPS in 1913; awarded Hon. FRPS in 1931, and was a member of the Linked Ring Brotherhood.
 
Clarence Hudson White ( 1871 - 1925) won a gold medal from the Ohio Photographer's Association in 1896 and he participated in the Philadelphia Photographic Salon exhibition in 1898. Together with Alfred Stieglitz, White and several other pictorial photographers co-founded the Photo-Secession. In 1906 he left his job as an accountant in Ohio to move to New York and become a full time photographer. He founded the Pictorial Photographers' Association; taught photography at university level, and set up his own schools of photography in New York, Maine and Mexico City.
 
LL/51610