Alvin Langdon Coburn

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Blue plaque on his home in Harlech, North Wales

Alvin Langdon Coburn (11 January 1882 - 23 November 1966) was a pioneering photographer.

1 Biography
2 Sources
3 Further reading
4 External links

[edit] Biography

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Coburn was a leading figure in the struggle for photography's recognition as a fine art. A member of The Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, he had a Symbolist period, 1905-1910. In 1916 he pioneered vortographs, an abstract work produced using mirrors in a vortoscope, rather like a kaleidoscope. After 1930 he made abstract photographs in the same vein as Minor White. In 1931 he was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.

In 1912 Coburn married Edith Wightman Clement of Boston and they moved to England. He spent most of his working life in Britain, becoming a British subject in 1932. He built a house in Harlech in North Wales and lived there 1918-45, before moving to Rhos-on-Sea, Colwyn Bay, on the north coast of Wales.

Strongly interested in the occult, Coburn was fully devoted to the Hermetic Truth Society and the Order of Ancient Wisdom from 1923-1930.

His publications include two books of collected portraits, Men of Mark (1913) and More Men of Mark (1922), and an autobiography.

There is a blue plaque, awarded by the Royal Photographic Society, on his home in Harlech, North Wales.