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16 COBURN, Alvin Langdon. London. With an Introduction by Hilaire Belloc. London & New York: Duckworth & Co., Brentano’s, [1909] “Twenty luscious hand-pulled photogravures” First edition, first impression, of this masterpiece of early 20th-century photography. Boston-born Coburn based himself in London from around 1906, learning how to make photogravures at the London County Council School of Photo-Engraving, and establishing a studio with two copperplate printing presses at the home he shared with “his domineering mother” in Hammersmith. These two publications, London and New York , were intended as the start of a series, exploring “the adventures of cities” each “containing twenty luscious hand-pulled photogravures” (Parr & Badger). Though Coburn had also envisaged publications on Edinburgh, Paris, Venice, Liverpool, Birmingham, Boston, and Pittsburgh, only these two titles were published. A member of the Photo-Secession group with Stieglitz and Steichen, Coburn began working within a symbolist- pictorialist framework, but he came to be influenced by modernism: “A friend of the Cubists, Vorticists and Imagists, Coburn had one foot in the 19th century and one foot in the 20th century. At their best his photographs straddled the divide”. Coburn’s credentials as a modernist are further asserted in his pioneering 1916–17 series of kaleidoscopic photographs, dubbed “Vortographs” by the poet Ezra Pound – several portraits of Pound were included in the series.
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Folio. Original bottle-green sheep-backed brown-grey paper covered boards, title gilt to front cover, mottled grey endpapers. With grey paper dust jacket, front panel with the title blocked to match the binding. With 20 photogravure plates, hand-pulled by Coburn, tipped on to heavy grey mottled paper. Spine sunned to brown, skilful restoration to joints and head and tail, prelims lightly foxed; jacket with tan-burn to spine, slightly rubbed and spotted, small chip at tail edge of the front panel, splits to joints now lined with Japanese tissue, some similar reinforcement along edges. A carefully restored copy of this austerely handsome but rather fragile book. ¶ Parr & Badger, I, p. 74; Roth, 101 , p. 38. £20,000 [132333]
INEXHAUSTIBLE LIFE
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