Alvin Langdon Coburn was born in Boston in 1882. With the gift of a camera from an uncle when he was eight years old, Coburn began to experiment with photography, an undertaking that would last a lifetime and would help define the art.

In 1899 he moved to England where he joined a distant cousin, Fredrick Holland Day, and made contacts with many of the day's important photographers. His first exhibition, in 1900, was with the Linked Ring Brotherhood, a group formed in England to emphasize photography as a serious art form. Coburn assisted Day when he organized the New School of American Pictorial Photography exhibition in London. After meeting Alfred Stieglitz through Day, Coburn joined the Photo-Secessionists, Stieglitz's organization of leading pictorial photographers and the American equivalent of the Linked Ring Brotherhood. Throughout the early 1900s, many of Coburn's photographs were reproduced in Stieglitz's Camera Work magazine.

Coburn gained recognition as a meticulous printer in a variety of media, including platinum and gum prints and photogravures. Years later, he would select a self portrait of his working the copper plate press as the frontispiece for his autobiography, ultimately defining himself as a master of the photogravure process.

"In the spring of 1904, I had a very memorable and fruitful interview with Perriton Maxwell, editor of Metropolitan Magazine," Coburn wrote in his autobiography. "I asked Maxwell to let me have a list of English authors and artists to photograph during my sojourn to the greatest city in the world (London)." The request would lead to a remarkable series of relationships and a photographic masterpiece called "Men of Mark." From 1904, when he photographed George Bernard Shaw, until 1913, when he the artist Henri Matisse was his final subject, Coburn captured images of the men he believed were the giants of the nascent 20th Century. They were artists, writers, poets, dramatists, critics - and even one U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt. He eventually published a second volume, More Men of Mark.

Portraiture was far from Coburn's only focus. His subject matter was diverse, and included cityscapes of New York and London, landscapes of the American West, and abstract photographs, which he called "Vortographs."

Coburn emigrated to England in 1912, and eventually became a British citizen. Around 1930 he gave much of his collection of photographs to the Royal Photographic Society and destroyed 15,000 negatives. Coburn died in Wales in 1966 and left his remaining works to the George Eastman House in Rochester.