Biography (Courtesy of Christian Peterson)
 
Having begun to photograph at an early age, Coburn became the youngest major member of the Photo-Secession. He skillfully made rich gum-platinum prints and also was very accomplished at the photogravure process. He created photographic landscapes, city scenes, and portraits in both America and his adopted country of England. Late in life he pursued mysticism and the spiritual by joining cult groups such as the Druids and the Rosicrucians. Alvin Langdon Coburn was born on June 11, 1882, in Boston, where he later met his distant cousin F. Holland Day, who was already making pictorial photographs and who encouraged him to do the same. Coburn also studied with the New York portrait photographer Gertrude Käsebier and the painter/printmaker Arthur Wesley Dow, who imparted upon him the Japanese aesthetic of asymmetry and flat, open spaces.
 
Coburn began making frequent trips to Europe in 1899, where he took in the culture, met other creative photographers, and eventually exhibited regularly. In 1902, he opened a portrait studio on New York's Fifth Avenue and a year later hung a one-person exhibition of his work at the Camera Club of New York. Stieglitz included twenty-six photogravures in Camera Work by Coburn, one of the best represented photographers, and gave him solo shows at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1907 and 1909. After the second of these exhibitions, Coburn moved to the Hammersmith section of London and set up two presses in his home studio in order to print his own photogravures.
 
Due to his interest in printing and publishing and his skill with the camera, Coburn's imagery was widely used as illustrations in high-quality books. The Novels of Henry James (London, 1907-1909), for instance, included frontispieces by him in each of its twenty-four volumes. Coburn's gravures illustrated The Door in the Wall (1911) by H. G. Wells, and were the features of his own publications London (1909), New York (1910), Men of Mark (1913), and More Men of Mark (1922).
 
Coburn collected work by other photographers and in 1915 used some of it in an exhibition he organized for the Albright Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York) called Old Masters of Photography that included Hill and Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron, and two other British photographers. Fifteen years later, he donated his collection to the Royal Photographic Society. In 1917, Coburn made an innovative series of modernist pictures termed "vortographs," that were abstract, cubist, and futuristic, inspired, in part, by his interaction with the poet Ezra Pound.
 
In 1930, Coburn left London for North Wales and two years later became a naturalized British subject. He was no longer photographing seriously at this time and in 1962 saw the largest solo show during his lifetime installed at Reading University. He died in North Wales on November 23, 1966, the year that his autobiography was published.
 
Christian A. Peterson Pictorial Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Christian A. Peterson: Privately printed, 2012)
 
This biography is courtesy and copyright of Christian Peterson and is included here with permission.
 
Date last updated: 1 June 2013.
 
Biography provided by Focal press
 
A member of the Linked Ring (1903) and the Photo-Secession, Coburn helped connect the European and American pictorial movements. His early work, influenced by Whistler, was soft-focus. Published Men of Mark in 1913, a significant volume of artists and writers portraits. In The Octopus (1912), he moved toward modernism by making pure form the content of the image through his use of aerial perspective, eliminating unwanted detail, and banishing the familiar, inviting viewers to celebrate formalistic beauty rather than the photographic impulse to identify and name subjects. In 1917 Coburn made abstract portrait photographs called "vortographs" by using a mirrored prism in front of the lens to distort, flatten, multiply, and transform his subject into a two-dimensional form, thus articulating how a photograph could be both subjective and objective.
 
(Author: RH)
 
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409] (Used with permission)
 
Wikipedia
 
Alvin Langdon Coburn (June 11, 1882 - November 23, 1966) was an American photographer who became a key figure in the development of pictorialism. He became the first major photographer to emphasize the visual potential of elevated viewpoints and later made some of the first completely abstract photographs.