DOI article:
G. [George] Bernard Shaw, Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn [reprint of preface of the catalogue for the exhibition of Alvin Langdon Coburn at the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain]
DOI Page / Citation link: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.30583#0047
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underdevelopment), and the result is a powerfully characteristic likeness.
Look again at the profile portrait of myself en penseur, a mere strip of my
head. Here the exposure is precisely right, and the definition exquisite with-
out the least hardness. These three portraits were all taken with the same
lens in the same camera, under similar circumstances. But there is no
reduction of three different subjects to a common technical denominator, as
there would have been if Franz Hals had painted them. It is the technique
that has been adapted to the subject. With the same batch of films, the
same lens, the same camera, the same developer, Mr. Coburn can handle you
as Bellini handled everybody; as Hals handled everybody; as Gainsborough
handled everybody; or as Holbein handled everybody, according to his
vision of you. He is free of that clumsy tool—the human hand — which
will always go its own single way and no other. And he takes full advantage
of his freedom instead of contenting himself, like most photographers, with
a formula that becomes almost as tiresome and mechanical as manual work
with a brush or crayon.
In landscape he shows the same power. He is not seduced by the
picturesque, which is pretty cheap in photography and very tempting. He
drives at the poetic, and invariably seizes something that plunges you into a
mood, whether it is a mass of cloud brooding over a river, or a great lump
of a warehouse in a dirty street. There is nothing morbid in his choices.
The mood chosen is often quite a holiday one; only not exactly a Bank
Holiday: rather the mood that comes in the day’s work of a man who is
really a free worker and not a commercial slave. But anyhow, his impulse is
always to convey a mood and not to impart local information, or to supply
pretty views and striking sunsets. This is done without any impoverishment
or artification. You are never worried with that infuriating academicism
which already barnacles photography so thickly—selections of planes of
sharpness, conventions of compositions, suppression of detail, and so on.
Mr. Coburn goes straight over all that to his mark, and does not make
difficulties until he meets them, being, like most joyous souls, in no hurry
to bid the devil good morning. And so, good luck to him, and to all artists
of his stamp. G. Bernard Shaw.
35
Look again at the profile portrait of myself en penseur, a mere strip of my
head. Here the exposure is precisely right, and the definition exquisite with-
out the least hardness. These three portraits were all taken with the same
lens in the same camera, under similar circumstances. But there is no
reduction of three different subjects to a common technical denominator, as
there would have been if Franz Hals had painted them. It is the technique
that has been adapted to the subject. With the same batch of films, the
same lens, the same camera, the same developer, Mr. Coburn can handle you
as Bellini handled everybody; as Hals handled everybody; as Gainsborough
handled everybody; or as Holbein handled everybody, according to his
vision of you. He is free of that clumsy tool—the human hand — which
will always go its own single way and no other. And he takes full advantage
of his freedom instead of contenting himself, like most photographers, with
a formula that becomes almost as tiresome and mechanical as manual work
with a brush or crayon.
In landscape he shows the same power. He is not seduced by the
picturesque, which is pretty cheap in photography and very tempting. He
drives at the poetic, and invariably seizes something that plunges you into a
mood, whether it is a mass of cloud brooding over a river, or a great lump
of a warehouse in a dirty street. There is nothing morbid in his choices.
The mood chosen is often quite a holiday one; only not exactly a Bank
Holiday: rather the mood that comes in the day’s work of a man who is
really a free worker and not a commercial slave. But anyhow, his impulse is
always to convey a mood and not to impart local information, or to supply
pretty views and striking sunsets. This is done without any impoverishment
or artification. You are never worried with that infuriating academicism
which already barnacles photography so thickly—selections of planes of
sharpness, conventions of compositions, suppression of detail, and so on.
Mr. Coburn goes straight over all that to his mark, and does not make
difficulties until he meets them, being, like most joyous souls, in no hurry
to bid the devil good morning. And so, good luck to him, and to all artists
of his stamp. G. Bernard Shaw.
35
