Assignment 2

Alvin Langdon Coburn

 

Born in 1882 and lived until 1966. Alvin Langdon Coburn was a Brithish photographer. During a visit to a distant cousin in London, art photographer Fred Holland Day, that Coburn became definitely fascinated with photography. In 1902 he opened his own studio in New York. There Coburn became acquainted with Alfred Stieglitz, in whose magazine Camera Work he published some of his photographs as photogravures. Through the circle of artists around Stieglitz, Coburn soon became familiar with the avant-gardistic trends of the art. Inspired by that trend, he began to explore new forms of expression with photography. He experimented with extreme perspectives and developed a strong interest in structures and abstract formations. In 1912 he left New York and went to Great Britain, where he remained to the end of his days. There he had friendly contacts among members of the English group of cubists founded by Ezra Pound and called "Vorticists". This connection inspired Coburn's "Vortographs", in which he achieved a cubist fragmentation of forms by using reflecting prisms.

Karl Blossfeldt

 

Born in the year 1865 and lived till the year 1932. Karl Blossfeldt was a german photographer. Blossfeldt achieved recognition for his microphotographs of plants, which were first seen by the public in his book Urformen der Kunst (The Originary Forms of Art), published in 1928.

His book contains 120 of the almost 6,000 microphotographs he had taken since 1890, when his teacher, Moritz Meurer, assigned him to make a collection of natural forms as an inspiration. He wished to show that although nature and art are profoundly different, all forms of art have their beginning in the forms of nature. In addition to his personal work as a photographer, Blossfeldt was an art professor in Berlin.

He always considered his work as a teaching tool, not as independent works of art. The beauty of the natural forms he photographed and the objectivity and lack of sentimentality in his work readily connect him to such New Objectivity photographers as August Sander and Albert Renger Patzsch.