Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1906 (Heft 15))

But Mr. Coburn uses and adapts both processes with an instinctive skill
and range of effect which makes even expert photographers, after a few wrong
guesses, prefer to ascertain how his prints are made by the humble and ob-
vious method of asking him. The device of imposing a gum-print on a
platinotype—a device which has puzzled many critics, and which was
originally proposed as a means of subduing contrast (for which, I am told, it
is of no use) — was seized on by Mr. Coburn as a means of getting a golden-
brown tone, quite foreign to pure or chemically-toned platinotype, whilst
preserving the feathery delicacy of the platinotype image. Lately, having
condescended to oil-painting as a subsidiary study, he has produced some
photographic portraits of remarkable force, solidity, and richness of color by
multiple printing in gum. Yet it is not safe to count on his processes being
complicated. Some of his finest prints are simple bromide enlargements,
though they do not look in the least like anybody else’s enlargements. In
short, Mr. Coburn gets what he wants one way or another. lf he sees a
certain quality in a photogravure which conveys what he wants, he naively
sets to work to make a photogravure exactly as a schoolboy with a Kodak
might set to work with a shilling packet of P. O. P. He improvises varia-
tions on the three-color process with casual pigments and a single negative
taken on an ordinary plate. If he were examined by the City and Guilds
Institute, and based his answers on his own practice, he would probably be
removed from the classroom to a lunatic asylum. It is his results that place
him hors concours.

But, after all, the decisive quality in a photographer is the faculty of
seeing certain things and being tempted by them. Any man who makes
photography the Susiness of his life can acquire technique enough to do
anything he really wants to do ; where there’s a will there's a way. It is
Mr. Coburffs vision and susceptibility that make him interesting, and make
his fingers clever. Look at his portrait of Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, for ex-
ample! “ Call that technique? Why, the head is not even on the plate.

The delineation is so blunt that the lens must have been the bottom
knocked out of a tumbler, and the exposure was too long for a vigorous
image.,, All this is quite true; but just look at Mr. Chesterton himself!
He is our Quinbus Flestrin, the young Man Mountain, a large, abounding,
gigantically cherubic person who is not only large in body &nd mind beyond
all decency, but seems to be growing larger as you look at him—“ swellin>
wisibly,,, as I ony Weller puts it. Mr. Coburn has represented him as
swelling off the plate in the very act of being photographed, and blurring his
own outlines in the process. Also, he has caught the Chestertonian resem-
blance to Balzac, and unconsciously handled his subject as Rodin handled
Balzac. You may call the placing of the head on the plate wrong, the
focusing wrong, the exposure wrong, if you like, but Chesterton is right, and
a right impression of Chesterton is what Mr. Coburn was driving at. If
you consider that result merely a lucky blunder, look at the portrait of
Mr. Bernard Partridge! There is no lack of vigor in that image; it is
deliberately weighted by comparative underexposure (or its equivalent in

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