aspects of the photograph and the importance of
darkroom craft. Even as a student, Outerbridge
printed in platinum, rather than silver, for better
tonal range.
Although he tried pictorialist techniques and the
street photography idiom popular among his school-
mates, Outerbridge was drawn to the work of Paul
Strand, Edward Steichen, and others who sought
modernist abstraction and dynamic visual impact in
photographing common objects. His tightly-framed
early still-lifes, often composed from household arti-
cles, combine formal complexity with technical pre-
cision. InTelephone, 1922, a high angle and severe,
off-kilter cropping compresses this everyday appli-
ance into a dark, imposing mass of overlapping cir-
cles and crescents. His studies with the cubist sculptor
Alexander Archipenko are reflected inSaltine Box,
1922, where manipulating frame, angle, and light
source transforms an upturned tin into the destabiliz-
ing nucleus of a cubist field of fragmented planes of
negative and positive space.
Outerbridge had landed regular advertising as-
signments withVanity FairandHarper’s Bazaarby
1924, and his commercial photography recast pro-
ducts as novel, almost protean objects of formal
beauty, fetishized by consumer desire. His well-
knownIde Collar, 1922, renders a starched shirt
collar as pure form stripped of utilitarian pretense.
Placed on a checkerboard surface, the collar be-
comes a floating arabesque at odds with the rigidly
patterned background, strongly suggestive of the
surrealism of Man Ray as well as a precursor to Bras-
saı ̈’sInvoluntary Sculptureseries.
Outerbridge joined the Paris avant-garde scene in
1925, initially working at ParisVoguein collabora-
tion with Steichen, though his chronic difficulty
with authority led to his resignation after only
three months. The break with the influential Stei-
chen cost him an important ally in curatorial circles
years later, but Outerbridge flourished as a free-
lance photographer while in Paris, building a lavish,
automated studio in 1927 in partnership with man-
nequin manufacturer Mason Siegal. Freed from the
conservatism of his American roots, Outerbridge
enjoyed an extravagant, high-profile lifestyle in
France.Self-portrait, c. 1927, neatly encapsulates
the contradictions of his unabashed eccentricity and
self-absorption of the time. Decked out in top hat
and tuxedo, his harshly lit face is shielded by a
balaclava and goggles. The artist-dandy is disfig-
ured but dapper, at once worldly and enigmatic in
his spotlight as he paradoxically commands atten-
tion and retreats into secrecy.
Outerbridge befriended sculptors and painters
Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali,
Francis Picabia, and fashion photographer George
Hoyningen-Huene during this time, but his closest
relationships were with Man Ray and Marcel Duch-
amp, both of whom would have an impact on his
work. An early admirer ofIde Collar,Duchamp
explored fetishism in a way that resonated with
Outerbridge’s later obsession with sexuality and
the object. Man Ray’s versatility and innovative ap-
proach to photographic processes likely served as
sources of encouragement for Outerbridge’s incipient
experimentation with color photography.
His studio bankrupt and his marriage over, Out-
erbridge worked briefly in the film industry in Ber-
lin and London in 1928 before returning to New
York the following year, professionally and emo-
tionally exhausted. Escaping to his family’s country
house in Monsey, New York, he absorbed himself
in learning the relatively new carbro color process,
whose infamous complexity and renowned high
quality suited Outerbridge’s penchant for meticu-
lous, solitary work that produced rich results. Al-
though his photographs up to this time could be
easily inscribed within avant-garde trends, the
three-color carbro process was fundamentally dif-
ferent from nearly all photography produced at that
time and led Outerbridge to the individual, even
idiosyncratic, aesthetic he sought. His technical vir-
tuosity and elaborately staged still-lifes brought
him well-paid commissions throughout the 1930s
for magazines likeMademoiselle,House Beautiful,
andU.S. Camera, and he published a successful ma-
nual on color photography in 1940.
Although Outerbridge had made nude studies of
his wife a decade earlier, he took advantage of the
vibrant and sensuous properties of the carbro process
to embark on a series combining satiny elegance with
raw energy and brash artifice, all hinging on the frank
depiction of sexual fetishism. Mirrors, masks, and
selected clothing articles like gloves and stockings
abound in these works as Outerbridge drew not
only on his experience of surrealism’s sexual ambi-
guity and psychoanalytic foundations, but on the
breadth of art history itself. These works of the late
1930s lie somewhere in the provocative and precar-
ious territory between cheesecake pin-ups and the
Renaissance art tradition. InWoman with Snake,c.
1938, a scaly black serpent coils against the model’s
porcelain skin under an artificial tree, yet any evoca-
tion of Eve in Eden is deflected by the woman’s
bright, drugstore-counter lipstick and penciled eye-
brows.Dutch Girl, also c. 1938, faithfully recreates
the austere setting and solemn pose common to Old
Master portraiture, while the model’s forthright nud-
ity is heightened by the primness of her dainty lace
cap. The most troubling image, however, may beOUTERBRIDGE JR., PAUL