Talk: Alvin Langdon Coburn, the Great War, and the 'World’s First Abstract Photographs' / London, 30 May 2023

[Michael Pritchard]

As Great Britain faced a third year of gruelling trench warfare on the continent and dirigible attacks on its shores, the American expatriate Alvin Langdon Coburn joined with fellow London transplant Ezra Pound to produce a series of experimental photographs Pound dubbed ‘vortographs’.  This talk from Anne McCauley will explore how these pictures came into existence by focusing on the day of their public presentation at the London Camera Club and why abstraction found a particular resonance at this historical time and place.

Anne McCauley, ‘Alvin Langdon Coburn, the Great War, and the “World’s First Abstract Photographs”: 8 February 1917’ 
30 May ‘23, 1800 - 1930
Keynes Library, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H OPD
Free and open to all 
https://www.bbk.ac.uk/research/centres/history-and-theory-of-photography/