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Alvin Langdon Coburn
Vortograph
1917
Gelatin silver print
27.6 x 20.3 cm
National Gallery of Canada / Musée des beaux-arts du Canada
Purchased 2005, No. 41656
LL/63547
Curatorial description (Accessed: 16 December 2015)
Alvin Langdon Coburn's Vortographs, the result of collaboration with the poet Ezra Pound, became key examples of photography's transition from Pictorialism to modernism. Constructing a device dubbed a "Vortoscope" - which consisted of three mirrors joined together in a triangle around a camera lens - Coburn photographed objects, transforming them into dynamic and complex facets of light and shade. When exhibited at the London Camera Club in 1917, the eighteen images elicited general outrage. One reviewer suggested they were the result of "poseuritis." Even Coburn's friend and fellow photographer Frederick Evans called for the return of "sane art" and implied that these images were probably evidence of a misguided youth.
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