Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1882 134 East Springfield Street, Boston, Massachussetts, USA

Died: 1966 Rhos-on-Sea, Conwy, Wales

Year of Migration to the UK: 1912

Biography

Photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn was born into a middle-class family on 11 June 1882 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He showed interest in photography from a young age, after receiving a camera as a birthday present. Coburn's career in photography quickly became entwined with the UK’s photographic and cultural landscape. His first encounter with the country occurred in 1899, when, as a teenager, he travelled to London with his mother and met his cousin, the influential photographer, F. Holland Day. Day recognised Coburn’s talent and included his work in a significant London exhibition the following year, organised by the Royal Photographic Society (RPS). This early endorsement launched Coburn into London’s photographic circles and attracted the attention of influential figures, such as Frederick H. Evans, who welcomed him into the Linked Ring, a society dedicated to advancing photography as a fine art. Coburn was among the youngest and one of the few Americans to be admitted.

Following a brief period back in the USA, he returned to the UK in 1904, when the The Metropolitan Magazine commissioned him to produce portraits of literary and artistic figures, including G.K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Ezra Pound. This project laid the groundwork for his celebrated photogravure publication, Men of Mark (1913), which included portraits of notable European and American cultural figures. A second volume, More Men of Mark, appeared in 1922. Around the same time, Coburn travelled to Scotland to photograph Edinburgh in homage to the pioneering work of Victorian photographers, Hill and Adamson, producing moody urban landscapes that aligned with the Symbolist tendencies of his early style. Between 1905 and 1906, Coburn remained in the UK, developing both his technical and artistic practice. He mounted solo exhibitions at the Royal Photographic Society and the Liverpool Amateur Photographic Association in 1906, with Shaw writing the introduction to the catalogue. At the same time, Coburn studied photogravure printing at the London County Council School of Photo-Engraving and established a studio and press in his London home, allowing him to independently publish works, such as London (1909).

By 1912, Coburn had decided to settle permanently in the UK. That same year, after over twenty transatlantic crossings, he married Edith Clement and ceased travelling back to the USA. His relocation marked a new phase in his career, during which he began systematically documenting private collections through photography, including those of Charles Lang Freer and Pound. His engagement with Pound proved transformative: Coburn was introduced to the avant-garde Vorticist movement and began experimenting with abstract compositions. He developed a mirrored device, the ‘Vortoscope’, that fragmented and refracted images, leading to his brief but groundbreaking series of non-representational ‘Vortographs’, exhibited at the Camera Club in London in 1917. Although Coburn gradually shifted his focus to mysticism and spiritual inquiry, particularly through his involvement with Freemasonry and esoteric societies, his photographic legacy in the UK remained substantial. He curated exhibitions such as Old Masters of Photography(1915) for the Royal Photographic Society and continued to innovate until his withdrawal from the medium. In 1932, he formally became a British citizen. He later moved to Wales, where he lived quietly, while devoting himself to metaphysical studies. Despite turning away from photography, Coburn received continued recognition, including a retrospective at the University of Reading in 1962 and being named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.

Despite spending most of his life in the UK, Coburn is considered a major contributor to American pictorialism, since he was the earliest prominent photographer to explore the artistic possibilities of high-angle perspectives. Indeed, some of his most celebrated photographs were taken in New York around the 1910s, when he positioned his camera atop the city’s skyscrapers, aiming it straight down to remove any trace of the horizon. Throughout this career, his style developed from atmospheric pictorialist portraits and landscapes into radical visual experiments that pushed the boundaries of photographic abstraction. Influenced early on by figures such as Day, Gertrude Käsebier and Alfred Stieglitz, he combined technical precision with a fascination for Symbolism, often aiming to convey mood and inner meaning rather than straightforward representation. His later work embraced radical formal experimentation, including kaleidoscopic compositions and abstract ‘Vortographs,’ reflecting a growing interest in metaphysical and esoteric thought.

Alvin Langdon Coburn died in Rhos-on-Sea, Wales on 23 November 1966. In the UK public domain his work is held in numerous collections, including the London Museum, National Galleries of Scotland, National Portrait Gallery, Tate, University of Manchester Collection, University of Reading, and the V&A. in 2014 Ben Uri curated the exhibition, Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London, 1905-15, which featured works from the University of Reading collection by Coburn and Weber, the display and accompanying book initiated by Anna Gruetzner Robins of the University of Reading.

Related books

Margaret J. Schmitz, 'Capturing Futurity: The Artistic Exchange of Alvin Langdon Coburn and H. G. Wells', British Art Studies, No. 23, 2022
Percy North, Anna Gruetzner Robins, Nancy Ireson, Pamela Roberts, and Lionel Kelly, Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London, 1905-15 (London: Lund Humphries, 2014)
Mark Antliff, 'Alvin Langdon Coburn among the Vorticists: studio photographs and lost works by Epstein, Lewis and Wadsworth', The Burlington Magazin, Vol. 152, No. 1290, 2010, pp. 580-589
Tom Normand, 'Alvin Langdon Coburn, Robert Louis Stevenson and Edinburgh', History of Photography, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2005, p. 45-59
Karl Steinorth and Nancy Newhall, Alvin Langdon Coburn: photographs 1900-1924 (Zürich: Edition Stemmle, 1998)
Mike Weaver, Alvin Langdon Coburn, symbolist photographer, 1882-1966 : beyond the craft (New York: Aperture, 1986)
Alvin Langdon Coburn, More Men of Mark (London: Duckworth & Co., 1922)
Alvin Langdon Coburn, Men of Mark (New York; London: Duckworth & Co.; M. Kennerley, 1913)

Public collections

Related organisations

London County Council School of Photo-Engraving (student)
Mawddach Masonic Lodge No.1988 (member)
Royal Photographic Society (member)
Societas Rosicruciana (member)
The Linked Ring (member)

Selected exhibitions

Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London 1905-1915 (group show), Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London ( 2014)
Alvin Langdon Coburn (retrospective exhibition), University of Reading, Reading (1962)
Alvin Langdon Coburn (solo exhibition), Camera Club, London (1917)
Old Masters of Photography (exhibition organiser), Royal Photographic Society, London (1915)
International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography (group show), Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo (1910)
Exhibition of Photographs in Monochrome & Color by Mr Alvin Langdon Coburn (solo exhibition), 291 Gallery, New York (1909)
Alvin Langdon Coburn (solo exhibitions), Goupil Galleries, New York (1908)
Alvin Langdon Coburn (solo exhibitions), Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, New York (1907)
Alvin Langdon Coburn (solo exhibitions), Royal Photographic Society, London (1906)
Alvin Langdon Coburn (solo exhibition), New York Camera Club, New York (1903)
The New School of American Pictorial Photography (group show), Royal Photographic Society, London (1900)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Alvin Langdon Coburn]