1In October 1916, the photographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the poet, Ezra Pound, collaborated on a project that, Pound claimed, “[freed] the -camera from reality and let one take Picassos direct from nature” (L/JQ88). By fastening three of Pound’s shaving mirrors together into a triangle and setting them under a kind of glass light table, they produced an instrument they named the “vortescope,” through which they took photographs of crystals, bits of wood and Pound himself (Coburn Autobiography102; Weaver 9). These “vortographs” were exhibited at the Camera Club in London in February 1917, the forerunners of Christian Schad’s “schadographs” and Man Ray’s more famous “rayographs” which appeared over the next three years. For Coburn and Pound, however, they were an experiment that was taken no further, a brief -enthusiasm that seems to contribute little to an understanding of either of their careers.¹

2Nevertheless, the story of vortography provides a focus for a reconsideration of the competing claims of realism and abstraction during this crucial period for modernist aesthetics. The touchstone for this discussion in the context of photography is Baudelaire’s famous essay written in 1859, “The Modern Public and Photography,” from which my title is taken. Baudelaire inveighs against the modern public’s love of accuracy over beauty, and deplores their fascination with photography, which he predicts will lead to the enslavement of the artist to “external reality,” to truth, over beauty. “If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions,” he writes, “it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multi-tude which is its natural ally. It is time, then, for it to return to its true duty, which is to be servant of the sciences and the arts—but the very humble servant, like printing or shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented -literature” (154).

3The opposition that Baudelaire sets up here, between the philistine multitude’s adoration of the real and the artist’s love of beauty, has endured. We can see similar sentiments being espoused by aesthetes, decadents, symbolists and modernists, and they suggest that the aesthetics of modernity were constructed against the taste of the public majority. Such sentiments understandably stand behind some of the greatest twentieth-century critics’ rejection of modernism, and the argument, developed most extensively in the work of Georg Lukàcs, for the exaltation of realism. Pound is frequently seen as the heir to this strand of Baudelaire’s thinking, the paradigmatic example of the elitist modernist, whose staunch defence of abstract art and difficult poetry entails a rejection of the modern public. Vortography would seem to be a neat example of this tendency: the transformation of the democratic, legible, realism of the photograph into the elitist, illegible abstraction of the vortograph.

4My aim in this essay is to contextualise the vortography project, in terms of its aesthetic heritage and what we might think of as its sociology. In -particular, I am interested in the way responses to the vortographs were shaped by contemporary associations with realism and abstraction, and with the role of photography, which were motivated by more diverse forces than Baudelaire allows.

THE LANGUAGE OF VORTOGRAPHY

5Coburn and Pound met in London in 1913, by which time both had achieved considerable success in their respective fields. Pound was at the height of his reputation in England, contributing to both mainstream and avant-garde magazines, and writing and promoting imagist poetry. Coburn was established as a leading photographer in both America and Britain, involved in the most progressive movements of art photography, including Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession in New York and the Linked Ring Brotherhood in London. In April 1913 Coburn took the photograph of Pound that was subsequently used as the frontispiece of Lustra (1916) and the following year Pound drew up his ambitious, never-realised, plans for a College of the Arts, staffed by Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Arnold Dolmetsch and Edmund Dulac—and Coburn as head of the department of photography (SL 41-43).

6At this stage, Coburn’s style was mainly pictorialist, that is, heavily influenced by painterly impressionism. But Coburn’s friend, Max Weber, had recently introduced him to cubist and post-impressionist painting, and he was becoming interested in finding a way to “make abstract pictures with the camera” (Coburn Autobiography, 102). In 1916 he published an essay on “The Future of Pictorial Photography” in which he asked:

why should not the camera also throw off the shackles of conventional representation and attempt something fresh and untried? […] Why, I ask you earnestly, need we go on making commonplace little exposures of subjects that may be sorted into groups of landscapes, portraits, and figure studies? Think of the joy of doing something which it would be impossible to classify, or to tell which was the top and which the bottom! (23)

7Two months later, he invented the vortescope.

8The following February 18 vortographs were exhibited at the Camera Club, along with 13 paintings, and on the 8 February Coburn lectured to the members of the Camera Club on “Vortography and its relations to Modern Art.” According to The British Journal of Photography, Coburn said that “the making of these pictures was the most thrilling experience he had ever had in all the realms of photography”:

No longer was it necessary to tramp for weary miles through muddy lanes carry-ing a 10 x 8 outfit. You simply sat by the fire in the studio, manipulated your vortoscope, and wandered at will in a strange, unknown land of forms and patterns […]. The combination of masses was limitless; even the same series of masses, with different illuminations, offered a great variety to the student of vortography. He claimed for his new medium that it would do in photography, in the hands of the sympathetic worker, what Cezanne, Matisse, and others had done in painting, or Scriabine, Stravinsky, and others in music, as against academic traditions. It would show us big, primitive things almost for the first time. While declining for the present to reveal his vortoscope, he declared that he was deeply serious about vortography and its possibilities. (“The Camera Club” 87)

9Coburn’s enthusiasm was conspicuously not shared by Pound in the rather circumspect essay he produced (anonymously) for the exhibition catalogue. Like Coburn, he emphasized the pleasure of abstract forms, and he used familiar vorticist terminology to spell out how not to read the vortographs:

The modern will enjoy vortograph No. 3 not because it reminds him of a shell bursting on a hillside, but because the arrangement of forms pleases him, as a phrase of Chopin might please him. He will enjoy vortograph No. 8 not because it reminds him of a falling Zeppelin, but because he likes the shape and arrangement of its blocks of dark and light. (Zinnes 155-156)

10But Pound thoroughly undermines Coburn’s claim that vortography will have an impact comparable to the work of Cézanne and Matisse, by arguing that its best use is to assist the progress of modern art “as the anatomical studies of the Renaissance” assisted academic painting in the fifteenth century. Vortogra-phy may help the artist to work out, what he calls, “certain definite problems in the aesthetics of form” which might establish “a mathematical harmony of form, angles, proportions,‑etc., arranged as we have had a mathematical ‘harmony’ arranged for us in music” (EPVA 155-56). Like Baudelaire, then, Pound consigns photography to the position of handmaiden to painting.

11But although these remarks are derogatory—and they did offend Coburn—they are not quite as derogatory as they first sound. In fact, they are the result of an aesthetic heritage which Coburn shared.

12As Melita Schaum has discussed, Pound and Coburn were both deeply influenced by the aesthetic theories of Arthur Wesley Dow and Ernest Fenollosa. At the turn of the century, Dow was the most influential art teacher in America. His textbook, Composition, was first published in 1899, and its ideas were transmitted to generations of students through the twenty subsequent editions that were published up until 1941. (It was republished by the University of California Press in 1997.) Its approach is summed up in Dow’s explanation of his title: “Composition,” he writes in the introduction to the 1913 edition,

was chosen as a title because that word expresses the idea upon which the method here presented is founded—the “putting together” of lines, masses and colors to make a harmony […]. Composition, building up of harmony, is the fundamental process in all the fine arts. I hold that art should be approached through composition rather than through imitative drawing. The many different acts and processes combined in a work of art may be attached and mastered one by one, and thereby a power gained to handle them unconsciously when they must be used together. (63)

13The terms Dow uses are, of course, Whistler’s, but in his introduction Dow does not credit Whistler, but one of Whistler’s most important interpreters, Ernest Fenollosa: Fenollosa, he writes, “also felt the inadequacy of modern art teaching. He vigorously advocated a radically different idea, based as in music, upon synthetic principles. He believed music to be, in a sense, the key to the other arts, since its essence is pure beauty” (65).

14Dow had met Fenollosa in 1891, just under a year after Fenollosa had returned to America to take up the position of curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. After having developed an enthusiasm for Hegel and Herbert Spencer at Harvard, he had spent the 1880s teaching political -economy and philosophy at the Imperial University in Tokyo, and researching the history of Japanese art (Fenollosa vii-xxii). Like Dow, Fenollosa saw art as a reflection of social trends and a potential agent of social reformation, and in his influential articles and lectures he promoted an evolutionist scheme of history in which Eastern and Western cultures would be synthesized into a higher order by art, like Whistler’s, that drew on both traditions. Dow wrote Composition as an account of the system of art education they developed together and taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn: it emphasized the principles of abstract design over realist modelling and decoration, principles Dow and Fenollosa associated with Japanese and pre-Renaissance Western art.²

15In 1902 and 1903 Coburn attended Dow’s famous summer school in Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he studied painting, pottery and woodblock printing: he later said that “all my work has been influenced to a large extent and beneficially by this oriental background, and I am deeply grateful to Arthur Dow for this early introduction to its mysteries” (Autobiography22; Weaver 11, 18). Although I know of no evidence that Pound read Dow’s book, he may well have done while he was an undergraduate at the University of Pennylvania. He certainly would have known of Dow’s theories, not only because he was friendly with a number of artists studying at the Pennsylvania art schools, but more particularly because we know he read Henry Rankin Poore’s book, Pictorial Compo-sition and the Critical Judgement of Pictures (1903), which explicitly assimilates and critiques Dow’s approach. Indeed, when Donald Hall asked Pound about the influence of visual art on his writing, he said that this book had “started [him] on the idea of comparative forms before [he] left America” (31).³ And of course, since 1913 (and possibly before), Pound had become deeply familiar with Fenollosa’s work.

16When Pound suggests that the vortographs can solve “certain definite problems in the aesthetics of form” in his pursuit of “a mathematical harmony of form, angles, proportions,‑etc., arranged as we have had a mathematical ‘harmony’ arranged for us in music,” then, he is drawing on a cultural language established in the evolutionist theory of art set out by Dow and Fenollosa, in which the vortographs constitute important compositional exercises that will contribute to establishing the ideal art form, characterized by a mathematical harmony (EPVA 156). But Pound’s explanations made little impact on the -public reaction to the vortographs; the popular response was determined by a number of cultural factors which can be best understood by looking more closely at the setting for the first exhibition in 1917: The Camera Club.

SOCIAL CONTEXTS: THE CAMERA CLUB VS. THE PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY

17The Camera Club was located at 17 John Street, London, a smart address just off the Strand. In some ways it conformed to the model of the gentleman’s club: it had a big meeting room filled with well-padded sofas and chairs grouped around coffee tables, a large table with newspapers, and an imposing fireplace. Food and drink—alcoholic or not—were served to order, and members would gather for afternoon tea, “served in civilized fashion and at non-profiteering prices.” There was a billiard room which was popular in the evenings. But it also had elements of the photographic society: the club owned a range of photographic equipment, there was an “enlarging room” and a “daylight room” (in which to make prints). The club had a permanent collection of photographs hung on its walls, it also held a Members Exhibition every January, and around ten other exhibitions over the course of the year. Every Wednesday at 8:15 p.m. there was lecture, formal enough for members to be told to wear morning dress, casual enough for them to be allowed to smoke—Coburn’s lecture was in this programme. The lecture was preceded by a Club Dinner, held in Gatti’s restaurant on Villiers Street. Once a year, there was a special lecture to which ladies were permitted, and another one for children. The lectures usually concerned photography—in 1917 there were lectures on “Hints and Dodges for Practical Workers,” by Rev. F.C. Lambert, M.A., “Mountaineering with a Camera” by Mr. Louis J. Steele, and a “Practical Demonstration of Printing Processes” by Kodak Ltd., but other subjects were also covered, often travel accounts illustrated by slides that also illustrated the photographic ability of the speaker, such as “The Excavation of an Egyptian Temple” by Capt. H. R. Hall and “A Cen-tury of Political Life in Russia” by Professor Michael V. Trofimov. (Lecture List‑7)

18The Camera Club claimed to be a unique social space. The club’s “soundness,” wrote one of the members, Ward Muir, “lies in the fact that it meets a want. Men can find similar cheery companionship elsewhere, good billiard tables elsewhere, nice cups of tea elsewhere. But the clubs which provide these amenities are not camera clubs. Ours is The Camera Club, and it so happens that we have a right to emphasise the ‘the’ for there is no other Camera Club. Photographic Societies are quite a different matter—as some of us are only too dismally aware” (3). Precisely: whereas photographic societies aspired to professionalise photography, the Camera Club—despite the professional status of some its members and the esteem in which it was held—cultivated an atmosphere more associated with the gentleman amateur. The mix of lectures, which feature both practical hints and accounts of photography as a hobby, the emphasis on the comforts of the club, rather than the advanced technical equipment it owns, are set against the professionalism of the photographic society.

19Therefore, the Camera Club looked forward to the exhibition of Coburn’s vortographs not only as an art exhibition, but as entertainment, something to inspire some light-hearted banter to bond its members. Their newsletter, The Chronicles of the Camera Club, reported that

During February the Club received a shock (which, by the way, did it no harm) in the shape of an exhibition by that most ingenious and versatile of modern photographers, Alvin Langdon Coburn […]. The photographs were called Vor-tographs and were weird and wonderful designs of abstract subjects produced by the aid of a camera, a lens and a “Vortograph.” [i.e. a Vortescope] What the latter is, however, has not yet been divulged by the inventor […]. The Club could do with a similar outbreak every year,—not more often, however, for the sake of the nerves of some of the older members. (“The Club Exhibitions” 6)

20In the same issue, “George,” the Camera Club cat, listed in his column of things he “Would Like to Know,”

whether Coburn’s Vortographs were not a good advertisement for the Club—and Coburn.

whether we shall have one for the permanent collection in the hall.

whether they caused more swear words than his paintings. (7)

21When the vortographs were exhibited in Glasgow at the Scottish Photographic Pictorial Circle in April they were received less indulgently; as the society’s title suggests, photography was for them synonymous with pictorialism, and such a definition was undermined by vortography. They showed a much more professional concern than the Camera Club: the reviewer for the British Journal of‑Photography recorded that “several retrograde members seemed more interested in the means by which the effects were obtained than in the end which Mr.‑Coburn brought before their notice […]. Not one member could explain what Mr. Coburn was aiming at.” The most severe critic reported in the -article is Mr.‑James Huck of the Glasgow School of Art: “Vortographs he likened to a trickster who showed the backs of cards and invited his audience to believe the trick was correct. It was this attitude flagrantly thrown in the face of the -general public which was objectionable.” Huck ended by expressing surprise to “find time wasted in perfecting a machine to do this work, and likewise marvelled that they were placed in an orthodox mount” (“Mr. Coburn’s Vortographs at Glasgow” 226-27).

22The co-existence of the amateur Camera Club with the professional Photo-graphic Pictorial Circle is indicative of the mobile cultural status of photography in the early twentieth-century. This is of course, still the period when photography’s pretensions to the status of art were widely debated and largely criticised—the vortographs and their reception are part of that story—but that debate is by no means “purely” aesthetic. Early twentieth-century books on photography discussed its social use extensively: Stanley C. Johnson’s Saturday with My Camera (1905) is typical in its description of the social benefits of photography as a hobby: “Photography is one of the most engaging pastimes that have yet been devised for man’s amusement,” he writes, “It is an admirable pastime for the man or woman who works strenuously throughout the week who requires light but intelligent relaxation when the Saturday holiday comes round”. Like many other writers, Johnson emphasises the democratic nature of photography, which can “be pursued with equal pleasure at home or abroad, indoors or out of doors, by man or woman, by young or old” (17). Nevertheless, this relaxing pastime is consistently surrounded with the rhetoric of “work.” The Camera Club describes photography as work, Coburn usually does too, and even writing which is explicitly about photography as art, like Clive Holland’s essay “Artistic Photography in Great Britain” (1905), does not refer to the photographer as an artist, but as a “worker” (1). Photography has this in common with other crafts, but not, of course, with what Pierre Bourdieu calls “fully consecrated artistic activities, such as painting and music”, which are figured as transcending work (7).

23Photography’s status as a category of work which can be either a hobby or an art also facilitates its insertion into the marketplace. Photography can also make you rich. Numerous books were published on this subject, detailing which newspapers used photographs from non-staff photographers, how to get snaps of current events developed and sent quickly, how to build up a repertoire of photographs that would be useful to advertising firms—Ellis Deigh, author of Money-making by Means of the Camera (1920), advised, “with a pretty girl in the bloom of youth, a bubbling youngster possessing a winsome smile, and a tabby cat, any number of striking money-making photographs can be taken” (30). Stanley C. Johnson tells the encouraging story of a friend who spent less than seven pounds on his photography in a year, and got as a return on his money, not only a “healthful hobby which constantly took him out in the open on Saturday afternoons” but also “a sum considerably greater than ten pounds in cash” (407).

24What we learn from this is that photography is a hybrid medium, its practice not confined to a particular social group, its ends available for categorisation as souvenir, commodity or art. But because of that diversity of uses, and also because of the relative youth of the medium, the categories are unstable, and the photographers who saw themselves as professionals needed to defend their definition of photography against alternatives. Practitioners of high art also had a vested interest in maintaining a categorical difference between their own work and photography. Matisse, for example, responded to a survey in Stieglitz’s Camera Work with “If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have an appearance of art […]. The photographer must […] intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses […]. Photography should register and give us documents” (Besson 22). Both practitioners of high art and members of the photographic establishment—like James Huck—agreed that photography should preserve its “natural” realism.

25Just one month before Coburn’s exhibition opened, the Camera Club heard an orthodox defence of this position. Charles Marriott, photographer and novelist—and later art critic of The Times—had been invited to criticise the Members’ Exhibition, and on the same occasion he gave a lecture entitled “Truth and Accuracy.” He makes the Baudelairian argument that “painting is concerned with truth, photography with accuracy” and “an endless amount of trouble has been caused by mixing up the two,” but unlike Baudelaire, he advances the integrity of the camera:

By monkeying around with the exposure, controlling the development or doctoring the negative or the print you can crab the accuracy of the photographic record in the matter of tone, but you cannot defeat the honesty of the lens in the matter of outline. You can put it out of form and so blurr the outline, but it will still give you all the facts. The drawing of the lens is absolutely incorrupt-ible. (5)

26Coburn and Pound were certainly “monkeying around,” and what I think that phrase highlights is that serious experiments in abstract photography like the vortographs could be—and were—put in the same category as the playful bumblings of the amateur, and the photographic tricks that had been so popular at the end of the previous century. Reading through contemporary reviews of photography and material on Coburn, one finds that the vortographs repeatedly appear as a joke item. In the 1917 volume of Photograms of the Year, for example, W.R. Bland mentions the vortographs towards the end of his summary of the year’s work, commenting: “A very entertaining half-hour might be spent in finding out which way up Alvin Langdon Coburn’s ‘A Vortograph’ (Plate XLVI) looks best.” After discussing this question with great levity at some length (18 lines), he leads the reader to expect a more serious analysis: “One word more, in solemn earnest. This Vortograph is uncanny. It haunts me. I begin to see things in it. There is more in it than meets the eye. After half an hour’s consideration of and writing about it, it has become to me as a -living imp of Satan” (18). But Charles Marriott is not being light-hearted, his terms make it clear that he thinks attempts to “corrupt” the camera’s innocent eye are morally wrong. In 1917, this view gathered considerable weight from the context of the First World War in which photography was felt to have played a useful part—both as a healthy hobby that preserved one’s mental balance in the stressful period, and as an instrument for precise record and reconnaissance (Mortimer 4). In such a climate, the vortographs could look both irreverent and outdated: one of the most prominent photography critics, Antony Guest, predicted that the war would “disperse” “shams and superfluities” from photography, and that in the future, the photographer’s “way will be nearer to Nature, aims will be simpler, and what is deep and permanent will have more genuine and direct expression”. But, significantly, Guest envisages this affirmation of realism as infused with spirituality and idealism, because “we have seen what mere materialism has done for Germany, and it is not likely to be in favour” (19-20).

IDEALISM AND REALISM

27Although Coburn, like Pound, did not fight in the First World War, he later said that “it was nevertheless an experience that left a deep mark, and led to an intensified search for things of the spirit.” After the war, he moved to Harlech in North Wales, and on 18 June 1919 became a Freemason, to investigate “the hidden mysteries of nature and science” (Autobiography102). Despite the fact that Pound was also active in occult circles during this period, there is no suggestion in either of their writings that these shared convictions were an -element of their friendship or aesthetic collaboration. Nonetheless, both individually represented the vortography experiment as part of an idealist, and, I think, esoteric, project (Coburn “Photography and the Quest of Beauty” 159-67). In this, they follow Baudelaire’s rejection of the camera’s accuracy in favour of pursuing deeper truths. However, in the cultural climate of the First World War, this does not constitute an anti-realist move, it rather—at least in intention—echoes Antony Guest’s call for in idealist realism that eschews both the “shams and superfluities” that the war has made irrelevant, and the materialist accuracy associated with Prussian culture.

28I have deliberately resisted making comparisons between the vortographs and Pound’s poetry: I do not think the vortographs themselves contributed anything to Pound’s poetics that had not already been worked out in the context of vorticist painting. But 1916 and 1917 were crucial years for the composition of the first cantos, and for that reason it is worth noting vortography’s lack of impact upon them. When Pound published his first three cantos in Poetry, in June, July and August 1917, he ended the first canto with praise for the “new world” of painting represented by Picasso and Lewis, and the programmatic, if unresolved, statement, “If for a year man write to paint, and not to music—” (121). But the fact that Pound specifies painting is important, because what he seems to want for The Cantos at this point is an equivalent of Lewis’s ability to represent contemporary life in a way which is both immediate and, above all, intelligent: in a draft section of “Canto IV,” Pound remarks how

Lewis with simpler means

Catches the age, his Timon,

Throws our few years onto a score of pasteboards,

Says all our conflict, edgey, epigram[m]atic. (Ur-Cantos IV)

29The immediacy which connotes intelligence is just what Pound thought could not be represented by vortography: the automatic machinery of the camera, he thought, inhibited expression. In an unpublished fragment originally intended for “Canto XXVII,” written at the peak of his interest in machines, in the late 1920s, Coburn’s work appears as an example of the best of machine art, which is nevertheless “rot”:

machine made art

ROT

always the automatic

part

the part not penetrated

by intelligence

/even in M. Ray

Coburn./M. Ray

The automatic part—still

further reduced? (Draft of Canto XXVII)

30In later years, Pound continued to see vortography as an important -experiment, but one that was soon superseded. In his book on Machine Art he wrote that Man Ray’s experiments with photography and “Ballet Mécanique,” the film made by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger, with music by Georges Antheil, both descended from the invention of the vortoscope, and both had improved on the achievements of the vortographs (76).

31Coburn did not produce any more vortographs after 1917, and after he moved to Wales he devoted his time to Freemasonry and disappeared into relative obscurity. When asked why he let his professional life as a photographer lapse, he replied in terms Pound might have echoed: “Photography teaches its devotees how to look lovingly and intelligently at the world, but religious mysticism introduces the soul to God” (“Photographic Adventures” 158).