Paul Outerbridge Jr: Photographs 18+

📖 This is the first important monograph on photographer Paul Outerbridge whose career has been hailed by critic Hilton Kramer of the New York Times as "one of the most interesting in the entire history of American photography. ... It was an amazing career, and it yielded more than a few pictures that are likely to remain classics of the medium for a long time to come." From the early 1920s to his last major commercial work in the early 1940s, he was a photographic perfectionist aspiring to pictorial, technical, and aesthetic excellence. Colleague and intimate of Man Ray, Picasso. Picabia, Braque, Stravinsky, Duchamp. and other 1920s art notables, Paul Outerbridge was a major proponent of cubist abstraction in photography. His rare photographs of astonishing design and precision, though widely published over the past fifty years, are collected here for the first time in a comprehensive presentation expressing the breadth and excellence of his works. After 1930, Outerbridge turned to color photography, pioneering the rigorous and luxurious carbro-color process. Utilizing meticulous technique and his iconoclastic vision, Outerbridge embraced new subject matter, undertaking what would become his most significant works. The disquieting reality of the photographed nude— unlike the respectability afforded nude painting by art historical precedence—caused museum curators and magazine editors to refuse exposure of Outerbridge's thirty-year study of the female nude. These extraordina...