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Lot 31 I want to see [photography] alive to the spirit of progress; if it is not possible to be "modern" with the newest of all the arts, we had better bury our black boxes. Alvin Langdon Coburn
ALVIN LANGDON COBURN (1882-1966)
Vortograph (The Eagle), 1917
Closed4 April 2013
Price Realised
USD 339,750
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Specialist note
Alvin Langdon Coburn's career as a Vorticist photographer began in London in 1917 and lasted for only about a month. Anxious to disprove the common notion that the camera could not be truly abstract, he made 18 Vortographs now prized for their rarity, compositional strength and the fact that they take abstraction in photography just about as far as it can go.
The Vortographs were made with three mirrors clamped together in a triangle, into which the lens of the camera was projected and through which various objects (crystals and wood placed on a table with a glass top) were photographed. The resulting images, exhibited at the Camera Club in London, prompted the Vorticist poet Ezra Pound to proclaim in his introduction for the exhibition catalogue that 'the camera is freed from reality.'
The Vortographs were made with three mirrors clamped together in a triangle, into which the lens of the camera was projected and through which various objects (crystals and wood placed on a table with a glass top) were photographed. The resulting images, exhibited at the Camera Club in London, prompted the Vorticist poet Ezra Pound to proclaim in his introduction for the exhibition catalogue that 'the camera is freed from reality.'