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VORTOGRAPH NO. 8

measurements note
11 by 8 3/8 in. (28 by 21.3 cm.)

annotated '67:098:38' and '(Copy A)' in an unidentified hand in pencil on the reverse, matted, 1917

PROVENANCE

Bequest of the photographer to the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York, 1967

Helios Arts, Inc., New York

Acquired by the Gilman Paper Company from the above, 1977

LITERATURE

Other prints of this image:

Mike Weaver, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Symbolist Photographer, 1882 - 1966 (Aperture, 1986), p. 70

Frank DiFrederico, 'Alvin Langdon Coburn and the Genesis of Vortographs,' History of Photography, October - December 1987, Volume 11, No. 4, fig. 25

NOTE

In 1916 and 1917, Coburn executed a series of photographs generally recognized as the first abstract photographs. Named Vortographs, they were made with an assembly of three mirrors which refracted and multiplied the objects being photographed, divorcing them from any context and presenting them as pure, abstracted form. Like the other proprietary ''graphs' that were to follow in the coming decades -- Rayographs and Schadographs, among them -- the term Vortograph embodied not only a particular photographic technique, but an expression of one photographer's visual imagination.

Coburn's Vortographs owed their name to the English art movement, Vorticism. Spearheaded by the artist Wyndham Lewis and promoted by the American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound, Vorticism was the English response to the continental Futurist and Cubist movements. A group exhibition in London in 1914 put the movement before the public, and a series of manifestos were published in Lewis's graphically precocious journal BLAST. While it would be difficult to identify a single commonly-held philosophy of the Vorticist movement, Pound, its most vocal proponent, summed up Vorticism's spirit and energy as follows: 'the image is not an idea, [but] a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a vortex, from which and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing. In decency one can only call it a VORTEX. And from this necessity came the name "vorticism"' (quoted in History of Photography, October - December 1987, Volume 11, Number 4, pp. 288-89).

In broad terms, Vorticist art is non-representational, vigorously geometric, and frequently characterized by strong diagonally-oriented compositions. In this respect, Coburn's Vortographs are very much of a piece with work by Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, Frederick Etchells, and other of the movement's painters. Coburn's connection to Vorticism came through Pound, whom the photographer met in 1913 while making portraits for his book More Men of Mark. Through Pound, Coburn gained access to the London avant-garde, and the men's friendship developed concurrently with Vorticism. Coburn, well aware of the movement and its parallels in Europe, felt that in order for photography to remain at the cutting edge of expression, photographers needed to incorporate new ideas into their work. In an article entitled 'The Future of Pictorial Photography,' published in the 1916 edition of Photograms of the Year, Coburn asked,

'why should not the camera throw off the shackles of conventional representation and attempt something fresh and untried? Why, I ask you earnestly, need we go on making commonplace little exposures of subjects that may be sorted into groups of landscapes, portraits, and figure studies? Think of the joy of doing something which it would be impossible to classify, or to tell which was the top and which the bottom!'

It was with this sense of adventure that Coburn embarked upon his series of Vortographs. The first images he made with his Vortoscope were of Pound, in which the poet is attended by reflections of himself and various angular, abstract shapes. These images, essentially abstracted portrait studies, set the stage for the fully abstract images to come. Working with crystals and pieces of wood, Coburn created images in which these objects are completely abstracted. The abstraction which had been hinted at in some of Coburn's earlier images (e.g., The Octopus, 1912; Station Roofs, Pittsburgh, 1910) is fully realized in the Vortographs. As Keith Davis writes, the Vortographs 'represent the first body of artistic photographs in history to embrace total abstraction. . . the best of these Vortographs are quite remarkable: boldly composed, mysteriously unreal, and intensely vibrant with light and energy. . . These images are, most importantly, about the idea of form and power, and come as close as any ever made to giving pictorial expression to thought itself' (An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, second edition, p. 118).

In 1917, Coburn was offered an exhibition at the Camera Club, London, and he chose to show his Vortographs, as well as a selection of his recent paintings. A print of the Vortograph offered here was included in this exhibition. When confronted with these revolutionary photographic images, some critics were baffled, others were angered, and the exhibition sparked a heated debate about the future direction of photography.

The Vorticist movement lost its momentum with the onset of the First World War, and never revived afterward. Coburn, having carried photography into the modern world of abstraction, ceased making Vortographs in 1917, and shortly thereafter retired from photography altogether to concentrate on his spiritual studies.

The Vortograph offered here was one of three prints of the image, including a reversed variant, in the 1967 bequest of Alvin Langdon Coburn's work to the George Eastman House.