The Cleveland Museum of Art
Collection Online as of April 19, 2024
Vortograph
1917
(British, 1882–1966)
Image: 20.2 x 26.4 cm (7 15/16 x 10 3/8 in.); Matted: 45.7 x 55.9 cm (18 x 22 in.)
Location: not on view
Description
The expatriate American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, who permanently moved to London in 1912, was one of the leaders in avant-garde photography in the early 20th century. In his desire to create art that combined the physical with the spiritual, he produced an extraordinary yet tiny body of work between October 1916 and January 1917, calling the series Vortographs. In the history of the medium, these remarkable works were the first group of artistic photographs to be entirely abstract. Their subjects were reduced to the essential elements of light and form by placing a vortoscope, a triangular arrangement of mirrors, over the camera's lenses. This stunning picture is distinguished by its bold composition of ambiguous, reflected, and split shapes radiating vibrant light and energy. With such photographs, Coburn freed the camera from its obligation to represent reality, employing it instead to pursue pure pictorial invention.- Sims, Lowery Stokes. The persistence of geometry: form, content, and culture in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2006. no. 60, p. 118, color repr. p. 60
- Shadows and Dreams: Pictorialist Photography in America. The Cleveland Museum of Art (organizer) (September 5, 2015-January 17, 2016).The Persistence of Geometry: Form, Content and Culture in the Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (MOCA), Cleveland, OH (June 9-August 20, 2006).
- {{cite web|title=Vortograph|url=false|author=Alvin Langdon Coburn|year=1917|access-date=19 April 2024|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}
Source URL:
https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2004.33