At the beginning of the 20th century, about the same time that painters were creating the first abstract canvases, photographers took up the challenge of making abstract photographs. The American artist Alvin Langdon Coburn attached a kaleidoscopic trio of mirrors to his camera and then photographed bits of crystal and wood. The results, often considered the first purely abstract photographs, were pictures of reflected and refracted light. When Coburn exhibited the photographs in London in 1917, his friend the poet Ezra Pound dubbed them “Vortographs,” after a Cubist-influenced English art movement called Vorticism.