crocodile city, originally uploaded by cath9.
An ‘internal landscape’ shot, perhaps. More dark, gritty, smoky cities, looking distinctly post-apocalyptic. Really I exposed it for too long, but this brooding, settling, expectant atmosphere as a result is worth it. Pinhole shot from third floor of car park.
Think of the damp, dreary banks of the Thames on a clouded Autumn workday. Same then as it is now.
I went back for another look at Alvin, because I found the above picture in a book, and that’s the one of his I liked origionally. There’s the gloomy, gritty London from before, with the smog and the people (surely that isn’t a ‘crowd’!!) going about their lives; and there’s the enclosing border and the buidings growing transparent like angular leaf prints, and that steam in the corner which to my mind lifts you above the city, and takes you into the air. I’ll not go over the nostalgia discussion again but several things spring to mind – there’s the quality of life down there, the transition of a city through time (I forget when they started to build the Tube, perhaps not quite yet), and (from prior knowledge of Coburn) the ephemeral nature of that steam, the spiritual or religious dimension for the viewer.
I don’t know much about this time in the history of photography, or about Coburn come to that, and this is my inexpert attempt to get it together.
Last time I read that he was a ‘leading member of the international pictorialist movement, which had considerable influence over the status of photography as an art-form during the first quarter of the twentieth century’. (Note – layout may be a bit odd from now on, can’t figure out how to fix it though. Not to worry).
Prior to this, Expressionism had distorted images of reality in painting to make them more representative of the artists’ inner feelings about what they were seeing (it was apparently also quite mystical at times, and this element, while emerging before his birth, would be right up Coburns’ street, as he took less photographs in later life and concentrated on astrology and the occult instead).
Post- Impressionism (1880 – 1900ish) then arrived. Here artists took it further, wanting a more interesting subject matter and more structure in their paintings. Some became more spiritual or used further symbolism, they used more adventurous brushstrokes and colours, moved away from a nature-based subject matter, or used more basic shapes. It was a very creative, innovative time, and the breaking away from nature seems to me a very large step away from the paintings of the past, Expressionist or before.
On the photographic side, the gelatine process (or ‘dry plate’ process had been introduced by RL Maddox in 1871, with the first dry plate factory appearing in 1879. So on the physical side, taking photographs had just become more stable and durable – still complicated but more durable and with a surface that was more light sensitive.
So Coburn is getting into his stride exactly when these inventive and experimental times are happening in both art and photography. Everywhere says that he was a mainstay of the ‘avant-garde’, and it was clearly the perfect time to be a talented, restless avant-garde photographer – everything was ready to go.
Aside from the pictures above, this is what he did:
‘Coburn passionately believed in liberating photography from the notion that it is only artistic if it depicted reality, and he is perhaps best known for producing Vortographs, non-objective photographs of such items as a piece of wood or crystal, through an arrangement of mirrors, resulting in multiple images.
In 1916 Coburn designed an item the poet Ezra Pound called a Vortoscope, which consisted of three mirrors arranged like a kaleidoscope, which enabled multiple-image photographs to be taken.
The British Journal of Photography (16 February 1917) comments on Coburn’s fascination for his vortographs, and his assertion that the creating of these “was the most thrilling experience he had ever had in all the realms of photography. For over a quarter of a century he had been using a camera in one way or another, but never had he discovered a medium to compare with vortography for producing aesthetic excitement and enjoyment.”
Between 1903-1909 his work appeared in three editions of Camera Work. Unfortunately Coburn lost himself in astrology and the occult, and his enthusiasm for photography waned somewhat after the first world war, though he again began taking photographs in the 1950s. ‘
From ‘A History of Photography, by Robert Leggat: Coburn, Alvin Langdon.
I found a quote somewhere that said Coburn produced the first ‘non-objective photography’, and I guess this is where he really hits the abstract.
What were the skies like.., originally uploaded by cath9.
when you were young?
Our local disused lighthouse, or reused I should say, which is currently a private residence on the market, and may soon become a B and B. If I could afford it I might well, but you might have to pay to have it moved if the front garden falls into the sea again.
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