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Alvin Langdon Coburn

USA (1882—1966)

Alvin Langdon Coburn was born in Boston in 1882 and received his first camera as a gift for his eighth birthday. Encouraged by the photographer F. Holland Day, he began exhibiting his work as a teenager. In 1902 he opened a studio in New York and became a founding member of the Photo-Secession; the following year he joined the British photographic association The Linked Ring. He settled in England in 1912 and, influenced by Vorticism, began exploring abstraction. In 1917 he exhibited his Vortographs, experimental images created using a device of mirrors that he called the Vortoscope. Around the same time, his growing interest in mysticism and metaphysics led him away from photography. He moved to Wales in 1930 and donated a collection of photographs to the Royal Photographic Society. Named an Honorary Fellow of the Society in 1931, he spent his later years pursuing spiritual studies. He died in Rhos-on-Sea, Wales, in 1966.