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Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 76/146
in the 1920s and began photographing the artists and dancers there, exhibiting his work along with
the likes of Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, Lisette Model and Philippe Halsman. In 1933, he was commis-
sioned by the Parisian humour magazine La Sourire to take some nude photographs, and he em-
ployed a fun-house (fun-fair) distorting mirror to do this, returning to a theme of distortions that he
had explored back in Hungary, shooting swimmers underwater. These delightful ‘surrealistic’ photo-
graphs are very much in the spirit of the time – Dali had painted ‘The Persistence of Memory’ with its
melting distortions in 1931. These photographs of the models Najinskaya Verackhatz and Nadia Kas-
ine are terrifically distorted, exaggerating their ‘nudity’ while at the same time reducing their nudity
to abstractions. They were recognised as such by art journals at the time, specifically Arts et Métiers
Graphiques (1933), and in Kertesz’ book of Distortions (also 1933). https://www.moma.org/collection/works/46414
Alvin Langdon Coburn: Ezra Pound 1917.
An American who lived much of the time in Great Britain, Coburn’s career mapped the history of pho- tography becoming art – in the period of the Belle Epoque – 1890-1910. He was an adept pictorialist, and was invited to join the elite pictorialist photographic club – The Linked Ring, he exhibited at the Royal Photographic Society, he studied in Paris with Edward Steichen and Robert Demachy, and studied with Gertrude Kasebier in New York. His work is featured several times in Camera Work, and he exhibits at The Little Gallery of the Photo-Secession. In 1917 he met the poet Ezra Pound and, in- spired by Vorticism – a short-lived post-Cubist English art movement somewhat related to Marinetti’s Futurism (what a tangle of ‘isms’ there are at this time) – Coburn made some very successful por- traits like this one of Ezra Pound, as well as a series of 18 virtually abstract photographs, that he called Vortographs. During this period, he also made some of the first purely ‘abstract’ photographs.
Alvin Langdon Coburn: Vortographs 1917 https://www.wikiart.org/en/alvin-langdon-coburn/vortograph-of-ezra- pound-1917
There was a tremendous vitality and invention in the British arts of this time, due in part to the ener- gies and talent of Wyndham Lewis, the publisher of Blast! magazine (1914-15) who gathered a small but significant group of artists and poets around his Vorticist movement. One of these was the ex- patriot American, Ezra Pound whose influence in Britain at this time helped bolster the reputation of writers like James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. Pound met Alvin Langdon Coburn in 1916. Coburn’s book of portraits of ‘Men of Mark’ had been published in 1912, and he was a highly successful photographer, making portraits of Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Henry James and other great artists and writers. Meeting Pound, introduced Coburn to modern abstract art and to Vorticism in particular. Coburn re- sponded to the modernist challenge (he was already a leading Pictorialist) by making this cubist/fu- turist triple-exposure print of Pound - a photographic interpretation of Vorticist ideas, and later made a series of 18 neo-abstract prints that he called Vortographs.