I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
    And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores, of the ocean and shores;
    I change, but I cannot die --
For after the rain, when with never a stain
    The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams,
    Build up the blue dome of Air --                     
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph
    And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
    I arise, and unbuild it again. –

                                    — from Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cloud (1820).

I first became aware of Alvin Langdon Coburn’s photographs while looking through the pages of The New York Edition of Henry James, which sat in its entirety, dusty and ignored, in my local library in western Michigan. Coburn’s images were frontispieces to the majority of James’ faded volumes, featuring small vignettes of European architecture that did not illustrate the stories and novels so much as record some of the sites mentioned in the texts, or at least allude to the kind of sites mentioned, in a discreet and almost mysterious way. The gravure printing of the frontispieces compressed the tonalities of the black-and-white images and accentuated the tooth of the thick matte paper on which they were printed. Coburn’s images hold a conscious sense of composition, which use the architecture in flattened and near-abstract forms. In its deliberate timelessness Coburn’s imagery can read as romantic, but a jarring asymmetry and a sense of incompletion truncates the romance. The image is never total, but instead seems more like a clue, an almost-there.

Coburn’s ability to create a tension between the specific and the general, emphasizing a mood, or a suspension of editorial narrative, emerges in other book illustrations he made; for Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Wells, Maurice Maeterlinck and for a deluxe edition of Shelley’s poem, The Cloud.1 With tipped-in platinum prints, Coburn created oblique vignettes of the picturesque and the suggestive, but never the complete.

The New York Edition was published between 1907 and 1917. By the time of its publication, Coburn had already become an internationally acclaimed art photographer in what was then a small but globalized circuit of photographic clubs as well as Alfred Stieglitz’s publication Camera Work.

Coburn’s photography bridges late nineteenth century Pictorialist photography—its Whistlerian palette of flattening patterns and its preference for metaphoric presence over description—with the twentieth century’s skyscraper modernism. Coburn began exhibiting his photographs while a teenager and completed the majority of his work by the mid-1920s, long before his death in 1966. In a sense Coburn was born to Pictorialism. He was mentored by his cousin F. Holland Day, as well as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Gertrude Kasebier. Coburn’s biography is littered with names of the writers, artists and photographers among whom he circulated: George Bernard Shaw, Henry James, Edward Carpenter, Ezra Pound, Frank Brangwyn, Frederick Evans. At a very young age Coburn was steeped in the cosmopolitan literary and visual culture of a generation older.

In photographic histories of the mid-twentieth century, Pictorialism is given short shrift. It seems weirdly old-fashioned in its tonal compressions, its deliberate pensiveness and its use of pictorial conventions from other media, especially graphics, as well as the eclecticism of its quotes: Whistlerian mist, the flatness of Japanese woodblock prints, vanitas emblems such as bubbles and goblets, Ophelia-like maidens in imitation of Pre-Raphaelite meditations of refinement and femininity, twilight worlds of Beaux-Arts gardens, the exoticism of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Pictorialism is literary: it quotes too much, it does not explore its own structure. Contrary to modernist aesthetics, it ignores its structure and continues a thread of illusion that the moderns meant to disrupt and cast into historical finitude. Pictorialism emphasized the sensibility of a known and globalizing culture: the residue of past forms, medieval and monarchial, secular forms of spirituality, posturings of decadent refinement which allude to the mannerisms also seen in the medical photographs of hysteria and mental illness which had come out of Salpetriere and Bethlehem Hospitals (Jean-Martin Charcot and Hugh Welch Diamond), and the eroticism not-so-hidden in Orientalist scenarios. Later artists and critics often saw this plurality of influences and quotations as symptomatic of morbidity, of hypersensitivity, of withdrawal from the world rather than engagement with it.

As opposed to modernist aesthetics based in totalizing form, function and hygiene, Pictorialism lacks ambition. Its morbidity keeps it from a robust sense of the present. It is always looking backwards. If one were to compare art photography of, say, 1890 through 1917, art photography looks like it had not yet encountered the optical effects of Impressionism, or the structurally abstracting tendencies of modern painting in the work of Paul Cézanne, or in Cubism, which was contemporaneous with Coburn and his Pictorialist contemporaries. No Picasso. No Brancusi. No primitivism.

In Looking at Photographs, John Szarkowski takes a rather strict tone with Coburn in a passage about one of the plates of The Cloud:

Clouds were a particularly good subject for an artist like Coburn who sought the broad poetic view of things. Granted that no two clouds are the same; nevertheless, their meanings (except to farmers and meteorologists) were sufficiently imprecise and generalized to allow Coburn to use them as abstract visual elements. Coburn used the skies as children and poets use them, and as Leonardo used stained old walls: as an analogue model of imaginary worlds.2

As if worried that this might sound too much like praise, Szarkowski clarified:

For those around the turn of the century who were seriously committed to the potentials of photography as a creative art, the fundamental stumbling block seemed to be the medium’s uncompromising specificity. If allowed to follow its natural bent, the camera described not Man but men, not Nature but countless precise biological and geological facts. This tendency was not in harmony with the artistic spirit of the time, which preferred an idealized view, and which sometimes confused vagueness with poetry.3

For a robust modernist such as Szarkowski, the key phrase is “If allowed to follow its natural bent. . .” Szarkowski refuses to accept the photograph as a product of cultures, he refuses to accept that there is no “natural” inherent to the medium. By the time of the Pictorialists, photography existed as a fully industrialized, mass produced form, which Coburn and his peers consciously rejected in favor of a deliberately well-crafted and unique form.

Szarkowski equates technology with a Darwinian drive towards a stronger and healthier form. The Modern was us, now and in the future, and any looking backward was a kind of sentimental nostalgia, an inability to engage with the here and now. Historicism was to be understood as a vague and rather fey weakness. In contrast with the cold hard scientific brilliance of Modernity, supposedly without national boundaries or styles, based in industrialized streamlining and in an eternal present tense of form, Pictorialism looked defunct, like a lady with the vapors or hysteria – diseases which no longer exist in our modern world.

At this point, beyond the scope of Szarkowski or the Museum of Modern Art photography department as a Baedeker Guide to art photography, there can be assessments of a plurality of photographic forms together which would have been unthinkable once upon a time.

Contra the existential rigor implied in modernist-formalist aesthetics, the photograph can appear as a purveyor of meaning that extends in a more viral form: it can telescope a past time to a flat sheet of paper or a glowing screen, it can contain all styles or no styles. In our digital age we are everywhere and nowhere simultaneously; likewise an image is an image and its status as such is clear to all. It’s not reality, it’s an image. As we float in an electronic ether, there is so much more logic now to, say, the likes of a Pictorialist such as Coburn: we need to know images already to recognize one as such. It’s not about looking for a new form, it is about learning various forms that we need to decipher a world of constant streaming images.

The photographic “specificity” prized by Szarkowski now seems nostalgic in its unreflective certainty. The attitude of “Just the facts, Ma’am” is now white, male and Western. Instead, in our ocean of electronic imaging, we never quite know what we know or how we know it; whatever we know is bound to be proven otherwise, somehow, elsewhere. In such a state of intense relativity, we end up back at the end of the poem by Shelley:

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
    I arise, and unbuild it again. –

* This essay appears in Pastelegram No. 1, The Sun Had Not Risen Yet / Now the Sun Had Sunk, as well as other essays. More information available on our print issue page.

• 1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cloud (Los Angeles: C.C. Parker, 1912).
• 2. John Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973): 62.
• 3. Ibid.