Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1904 (Heft 6))

SOME PRINTS BY ALVIN LANGDON COBURN.

FORTUNATE IN the artistic opportunities he has experienced, Alvin
Langdon Coburn is fortunate also in having some true stuff of the artist
in himself. It is his further good fortune to be still a young man.
Being a cousin of F. Holland Day, he became also his pupil, working
with him both in Boston and in Paris. In the latter city he enjoyed the
friendship of Demachy and the chance of familiarizing himself with that
distinguished photographer’smethods, at the same time coming under the
influence of Steichen. Returning to this country he had the further
privilege of studying for some months with Mrs. Käsebier and of spending a
summer with the landscape-painter, Arthur W. Dow, at the latter’sstudio
in the country.
In each case he found himself in contact with an artist of originality,
from whom he could get inspiration as well as experience in methods;
while the number of the influences he has experienced and his own originality
have saved him from the temptation to imitate consciously. So, the dozen
prints which hang before me as I write, while they exhibit various artistic
motives, which may be traced home to one or other of the artists enu-
merated, have yet a fair amount of personal distinction. The young artist
has been influenced by others in what to look for, but has contrived to
see the subject with his own eyes. Moreover, he has pursued for himself
some original experiments in the technical manipulation of his prints.
They are directed to a combination of the advantages of the platino-
type and gum-bichromate processes, so as to profit by the stability and
solidity of the effects in the one case, and by the liberty of action and the
increased richness of the dark tones allowed by the other. Thus,the results
shown in many of these pictures have been obtained by double printing-
by first establishing the strong foundation of the platinotype impression
and then by printing over it with gum. The advantage of this method
would seem to declare itself in the firm constructional quality which is still
preserved in most of the compositions, notwithstanding the freedom and
looseness of effect subsequently attained. For it is often too evident in a
gum print that the manipulator, in losing touch with the facts of the negative,
has lost his own foothold and has floundered further and further from the
substance of reality into a very bog of blackness. And I believe that the
more one studies pictures in these days when the temperamental quality is
exalted so far above knowledge — as if the passion for making shoes were
more desirable in a man than the knowing how to cut and shape and fit
them — the more one comes to see how mere temperament, unenforced
by knowledge, is fruitless. The poetic feeling must overlay a sound
fabric of construction or the whole scheme of the picture, though at a
first glance pleasant, will begin, as you study it further, to totter and flop
to pieces.
Now the structural quality in these prints of Coburn’sis partly due to
the use of the platinotype; to the pledge which the operator thereby