Alvin Langdon Coburn
ALVIN LANGDON COBURN
“Portrait of George Bernard Shaw” Signed by
Coburn, 1913, photogravure from Men of Mark, ca. 1913, 8 1/8 x 6 1/4.
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ALVIN LANGDON COBURN
“Thames”, ca. 1900s, platinum print, ca. 1900s, 4 9/16 x 3 3/4.
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ALVIN LANGDON COBURN
“The Canal Rotterdam”, 1908, photogravure, 11 7/8 x 15 3/8.
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ALVIN LANGDON COBURN
“Isle of Marken”, 1908, photogravure, 11 x 15 3/8.
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ALVIN LANGDON COBURN
Ship’s Mast and Bridge, ca. 1900s, platinum print, ca. 1900s, 4 5/8 x 3 11/16.
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Alvin Langdon Coburn, American, 1882-1966
A.L. Coburn was born in Boston in 1882 and began taking photographs at an early age. In 1899 he moved with his cousin F. Holland Day to England where he met and made contacts with many of the day's important photographers. The next year Day organized the New School of American Pictorial Photography exhibition in London, and Coburn took part. Back in the states in 1902, Coburn opened a studio in New York City. Also in this year he was elected to the Photo-Secession, Alfred Stieglitz's organization of leading pictorial photographers. Throughout the early 1900s many of Coburn's photographs were reproduced in Stieglitz's Camera Work magazine. After working at the Gertrude Kasebier studio for a year he was drawn back to England to photograph a variety of prominent people including Rodin, Henry James and George Bernard Shaw. While Coburn's earlier work was primarily pictorialist, he eventually moved to a much more abstract style.
Around 1930 he gave much of his collection of photographs to the Royal Photographic Society and destroyed 15,000 negatives. Towards the end of his career in the 1950s he took 300 photographs on a trip to the island of Madeira off the coast of Portugal. Coburn died in Wales in 1966 and left everything to the George Eastman House in Rochester.
For more information, see MacMillan Biographical Encyclopedia of Photographic Artists & Innovators, MacMillan Publishing Company, 1983.
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