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 Coburn, Alvin Langdon  (American, 1882-1966)

Moor Park is a quintessential example of an eighteenth-century country house. Coburn’s photos of the house include soft-focus images of the parkland, framed studies of the statuary, and people-less shots of the great marble interiors. The images have a sentimental, nostalgic quality, perhaps a reflection of the fading authority and importance of the great country house estates. As such, the book is at odds with Coburn’s work of 1909, New York, in which his depictions of the industrial skyscrapers and bridges of Manhattan are designed to show the energy and modernism of the twentieth-century urban city. Coburn took these photographs while teaching photography to Moor Park’s owner, Lady Emilie Ebury.