“Searching for beauty to photograph opens our eyes to a new world of beauty; this is perhaps one of its most valuable gifts to us, it makes us increasingly mindful of an ever-richer and more glorious beauty in men and things, and in the panorama of the universe. Yet, behind the ever-changing beauty of the material world, there abides, immutable and serene, an Eternal Beauty which is its Cause, and the guarantee of its perfection."
    So wrote Alvin Langdon Coburn in his autobiography published in 1966. And, referring to this Eternal Beauty, he added,

“We cannot photograph this, but, if we glimpse it with the eyes of the soul, life is changed for us, and we can see even the manifested earthly beauty in a richer splendour and with a fuller significance.”

Coburn was born 1882, in Boston, United States. He became one of the leading photographers of the twentieth century. He first travelled to England in 1899, returning in 1904 when he photographed George Bernard Shaw. For the next few years he travelled between the United States and England but in 1912 settled in England and never again crossed the Atlantic. In 1918 he moved to Wales where he spent the rest of his life; and where he was to become initiated into Freemasonry.
    For the first time a Summer exhibition is being mounted at Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden, London, devoted to his photography. His photographs are linked with comments which touch upon the profound vision he sought to express.
    Coburn experts and guest curators, David Bellman and Meirion Evans, working with the staff of the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, have arranged this display of photographs and linked texts which reveal, both visually and intellectually, the intimate relationship which existed between Coburn’s photography and philosophy; which reveal how each informs and infuses the other.

The Art of Photography

For Coburn, photography was an art form able to stand side by side with painting, drawing and sculpture. Yet in the beginning – when he held his first “One Man Show” at the Royal Photographic Society in Russell Square, 1906 – this perception was not so. Coburn knew that photography had to fight to be accepted but knew that it had to fight from its own unique advantages – the great subtlety of tonal range possible in photographs and its ability to reveal the “infinite gradations of luminosity” instead of attempting to imitate existing drawing techniques. He pointed out that “whilst it is impossible to re-arrange trees and hills in the manner of the painter, it is possible to move the camera in such a way that a completely new arrangement is achieved, a few inches sometimes changing the entire design. For the creation of a picture, vision is of prime importance, and patience, and discrimination, and even marksmanship are decisive factors”. But the photographer seeks fragments of the beyond:

“The artist-photographer must be constantly on the alert for the perfect moment when a fragment of the jumble of nature is isolated by the conditions of light or atmosphere, until it becomes a perfect expression.”

And he sought to push beyond the limits normally accepted in photography. His photograph, “The Octopus”, 1912, was taken in New York looking down upon Madison Square where the pattern of paths indeed reminded him of that creature. He was aware of its weirdness to his contemporaries, “Depending, as it does, more upon pattern than upon subject matter, this photograph was revolutionary in 1912.”
    He continued to push beyond the boundaries. An aspiration which led him, in 1916, to develop what he termed “Vortographs”. He built an instrument of three mirrors fixed together as a triangle which acted as a prism splitting up the image in the lens. His exhibition in February 1917 was the first showing of purely abstract photographs, in fact, they were the first deliberately abstract photographs ever made. The poet Ezra Pound wrote in the preface to the catalogue of the exhibition that this technique had “freed photography from the material limitations of depicting recognizable natural objects”.

Coburn and Freemasonry

Aged 34, Coburn was initiated into Freemasonry in 1919, into Lodge No. 1988, Barmouth, North Wales. He was passed and raised later that same year. In 1920 he joined a Royal Arch Chapter and the next year he joined both Mark and Rose-Croix. His mystical perspective was nurtured and augmented in his masonic career; Freemasonry became central to Coburn’s life,

“Freemasonry is not a thing apart, cut off from life, it is interwoven with it, a thing to be understood and then to be lived, and the more it is studied with a view to spiritual progress, the more enlightened one becomes, and the richer in consequence are our lives”.

He continued working within the masonic world, in 1922 joining the Royal Order of Scotland, the Royal Order of Eri and the Rosicrucian group within Freemasonry, the S.R.I.A. (Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia). He meanwhile progressed within the various Orders becoming Master of his Lodge for the first time in 1929-30. In 1939 he joined the Manchester Lodge of Research, No.5502, and also the Lodge of Living Stones, No. 4957, Leeds, which maintained a very individual and mystical ceremonial.
    During this period he was advancing in the Ancient and Accepted Rite: he reached the 30° early 1927 and by 1939 had been initiated into the 32°. In March 1946 he was appointed Inspector General, 33°, of the District of North Wales a position he held until his death in 1966. Coburn was well aware of the need for experience in the search for wisdom, aware that empty ritual and passive perambulation would not communicate anything of value:

“…self knowledge is a difficult thing, and yet it is for all who resolutely endure. This knowledge, as the founders of all Mysteries have realised, cannot be communicated unless there is an ardent effort to understand, on the part of the candidate. The Mysteries may not be imparted exclusively by any external rite or ceremony. The inner must reflect the outer, the symbol must be made alive, deep must answer unto deep.”

The Artist and Beauty

Coburn described well the dedicated aspiration of all artists who seek to express that alluring ultimate beauty behind all life,

“It is a wonderful and inspiring thought to become one with beauty. All the artists of the world have knowingly or unknowingly engaged in this endeavour, the upward rush of their aspirations, the thrill of pleasure which has come to them with achievement, however slight and ever just ahead, luring them on; with this goes the glittering promise of the ultimate, the rainbow of perfection reflected and thus completed.”

And he commented succinctly,

“We are comets across the sky of eternity”.