With its roots in Futurism and Cubism, Vorticism was a movement introduced by the painter and writer Wynham Lewis when he published "Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex." In this the traditional values were ridiculed, and modern technology exalted. This movement was championed by the poet Ezra Pound, and made popular by Alvin Langdon Coburn, who was one of its leading exponents.
Like all movements, a concise definition can be misleading, but one of the aims of the Vorticist photographer was to mirror the complexity of industrialised civilisation. The roots of this were in Cubism.
Another exponent of this relatively short-lived movement (three years or
so) was Malcolm Arbuthnot, a regular contributor to the Amateur
Photographer in the early part of the 20th century.
© Robert Leggat, 1999.