This paper discusses Alvin Langdon Coburn’s vortographs through the lens of abstraction that previously laid the foundations of the early twentieth-century plastic art of painting and sculpture. Vortographs are the first type of nonobjective photography and its name refers to the Vorticist group of British writers and painters, who were interested in the fractured planes and complex distribution of space akin to Cubism and Futurism. Coburn’s technique is significant to modern visual culture to the extent that it disputes the popular belief that the camera is only limited to the mimetic duplication of the world. Instead, these abstract pictures attest to the creative potential of the photographic medium, as the referent is transformed into a radically different reality thanks to the juxtaposition of aligned mirrors that produce unconventional forms and light effects. The resulting image becomes an elusive entity that reveals the power of the prismatic view to rethink the ontology of the photographed object. Coburn elevated the mechanical art of photography to an aesthetic category that emulates the geometrism of Cubism and the dynamism of Futurism. His Vortograph of Ezra Pound is representative of an autonomous aesthetics that relies upon the subjectivity of the artist’s mind, as well as the ability of the viewer to distinguish between reality and illusion in the process of deciphering the dissected image. Vortographs are thus the maximum expression of photography in considering the alterity of the world and the coalescence of different viewpoints.