Alvin Langdon Coburn

A first edition of Alvin Langdon Coburn's photobook New York.

• Alvin Langdon Coburn (American).
• With a foreword by H. G. Wells.
• London and New York: Duckworth & Co, Brentano’s, [1910].
• Folio.
• 12, [40] pages.
• 20 hand-pulled photogravures printed under Coburn’s supervision from plates prepared by him.
• Grey endpapers, olive morocco-backed grey boards with gilt lettering on upper side, publisher’s grey printed dust jacket with letterpress titles in dark blue on upper side, in a custom drop spine box.

In 1909 and 1910, Coburn produced two books, London and then New York. While the photographs in London reach back to the nineteenth century and beyond, New York is the more proto-modernist work, with this most modern of twentieth-century cities pushing Coburn towards a more radical way of seeing.

In Camera Work 36 (October 1911), Coburn wrote: ‘It has been said of me... that I work too quickly, and that I attempt to photograph all New York in a week. Now to me New York is a vision that rises out of the sea as I come up the harbor on my Atlantic liner... I can do only the creative part of photography, the making of the negative, with the fire of enthusiasm burning at the white heat; but the final stage, the print, requires quiet contemplation, time, in fact, for its fullest expression. That is why my best work is from American negatives printed in England... it is only at twilight that the city reveals itself to me in the fullness of its beauty, when the arc lights on the Avenue click into being.'