Page 110 - Expanded-Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 110/145
Paul Outerbridge: Nude Lieing on a Love Couch 1936. Outerbridge - an American photo- grapher the same age as Blumenfeld, had trained at Clarence White’s School of Photography, - and thus under the influence of the Pictorialists. He is notable for his experiments in Colour photography - Kodak and Agfa and others began marketing reversal colour film (‘colour slides’) in the mid 1930s, and Outerbridge began exploring this new medium, using the tri- color Carbro process, notably with his colour nudes - some far to risqué to be actually pub- lished in puritanical America at that time. Furthermore, CMYK colour printing for reproduction in mass publications (especially magazines, but also posters, hoardings, etc) was still not per- fect in the 1930s.
His colour nudes - especially the early ones from the 1930s and 1940s - have a David Lynch-like fascination of balancing the surgical and the erotic in such fine tension. And Outerbridge - in sever- al trips to London and Paris in the 1920s, came to know and associate with some of the great exper- imental photographers and artists - Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Edward Steichen and Berenice Ab- bott...
“In 1929 he returned to New York, where he opened a studio producing commercial and art photo- graphy and became the highest-paid image-maker in the city. He also started experimenting with colour photography using the complicated tri-color carbro process, and by 1937 his work was in- cluded in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1940 he published his seminal book, Photo-
graphing in Color.” (British Journal of Photography) https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/outerbridge/