Page 110 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 110/146
Paul Outerbridge: Nude Lieing on a Love Couch 1936.
Outerbridge - an American photographer 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, not- ably with his colour nudes - some far to risqué to be actually published 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 perfect 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/