Nineteenth century photographs

The soft focus and muddy tones of this image by Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966) were typical of photographers who made up the Photo-secession Group just after the turn of the twentieth century. Led by Alfred Stieglitz, they were dedicated to establishing photography as a fine art. Coburn produced a substantial body of work, at least half of it while living in England, including a series of portraits of prominent writers, artists and intellectuals, as well as a variety of cityscapes. He was a major contributor to Stieglitz's influential quarterly magazine, Camera Work, and this version of The Bridge—Ipswich was scanned from a print from that magazine.

         
         No. 1 April 2006

The Bridge—Ipswich was taken in Massachusetts, not in England, although Coburn is often thought of as an English photographer. He was born in America and lived here until establishing a studio in London in 1904). By 1913 he was regarded as a pictorialist photographer, and later in that decade did some interesting experimental work. His best-known image is The Octopus, a view of New York's Washington Square from above.

The composition is simple, but the bold form of the bridge dominates. Today his work would be criticized for its lack of sharpness, limited tonal range, absence of detail and weakness in the shadows, but those aspects were celebrated elements of the painterly approach to photography advocated by the Photosecession.The diffused atmospheric effects, soft focus, and occasionally manipulated images of Coburn and others were characteristic of an approach to photography that was important in Europe and America in the first two decades of the twentieth century. By 1914, Coburn and several others hived off from Stieglitz, to found a school that was soon to be known as pictorialist, and which was to dominate much of photography for the next dozen years or so.