1. EDWARD STEICHEN, Bartholome, 1903, 6.8x5.25" Photogravure from Camera Work Issue 2, April 1906, Printed 1903.

2. ALVIN LANGDON COBURN, Rodin, 1908, 7.825x6.25" Photogravure from Camera Work Issue 21, January 1908, Printed 1908.

Edward Steichen (1879-1983) along with Alfred Stieglitz led an aesthetic revolution that helped shift photography from being merely a documentary record to an art form capable of interpretation and expression. During his long life Steichen was a successful artist, recognized for his elegant pictorial photographs and tonalist studies of moonlit landscapes. He was also a fashion photographer, curator, writer, and technical innovator. Influenced by the abstract tendencies of Modernism he shifted to a straight style of photography concerned with pure design and strong compositions. Yet his early pictorial photographs filled with soft focused, painterly effects are some of his finest work.

Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966) was legendary for his photogravure images and printmaking, abstract Vortographs, and modern landscapes of the Grand Canyon and California. An eighth-birthday gift of a Kodak camera launched Coburn's photographic career. At about age sixteen, he came under the tutelage of his cousin, the publisher and photographer F. Holland Day. Coburn in turn taught Day how to print his own images and assisted him in hanging the landmark exhibition "The New School of American Pictorial Photography." Coburn later worked in Gertrude Kasebier's New York studio for about a year. Coburn was one of few photographers who enthusiastically embraced the photogravure process to produce his own books and exhibition prints. When he was young, he studied with the American painter-printmaker Arthur Wesley Dow, who instilled in Coburn the desire to combine art and craft.

In 1902 Coburn became a founding member of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession and opened a studio to display his work on Fifth Avenue in New York. In the following year he joined the British group The Linked Ring. He soon became highly influenced by the Symbolist movement and especially James McNeil Whistler's paintings. Coburn emigrated from Boston to Britain in 1912 and became a naturalized citizen some twenty years later. In 1904 his first portfolio appeared in Camera Work. In 1906 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society. In 1910 he began a series of books illustrated with hand-pulled photogravures. Coburn was strongly influenced by the Cubists and began experiments with abstraction in photography. Despite his expatriation, he co-founded the Pictorialist Photographers of America in 1916, and was later elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. In 1919 he moved to North Wales and began to investigate the mysteries of nature and science through the agencies of Freemasonry, Christianity, and Zen Buddhism. In 1932 he became a naturalized British subject.

CREDIT: https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.19222.html and https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/1957/alvin-langdon-coburn-british-born-united-states-1882-1966/

Influential in establishing photography as an art form in the United States, Alfred Stieglitz edited and published magazines, organized photographers, operated galleries, and crafted his own creative photographic images. He promoted the photogravure process as an original means of photographic printmaking. Stieglitz had hands-on experience with photogravure and used it extensively for his work and the work of fellow pictorialists. He initially worked at the Photochrome Engraving Compan in New York, where he gained intimate knowledge of photogravure and other printing processes. In 1897 Stieglitz issued  Picturesque Bits Of New York And Other Studies, a portfolio of his own large-format gravures, for which he personally made the film positives for plate making. At this time, he marketed his individual photogravures as collectible, original works of art, numbering, signing, and printing them in limited editions. Stieglitz used the photogravure process for most of the illustrations in his groundbreaking periodicals, Camera Notes (1897-1903) and Camera Work (1903-1917). The photogravures in these journals, all personally approved by Stieglitz, enabled a larger audience to experience the artful qualities of photography. He was so confident of the quality of these gravures that he occasionally sent them to be displayed at international exhibitions of artistic photography.

Credit: https://photogravure.com/key-figure/alfred-stieglitz/

1. Excellent. Minor wear.
2. Excellent. Minor wear. Image transference on mount verso.