Paul Outerbridge (1896-1958) was a master of photographic desire, a shape-shifting orchestrator of Apollonian light and Dionysian shadow. His strange career is well served by a beautiful, museum-caliber retrospective at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in Chelsea.
In the 1920s, along with Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and his chief rival, Edward Steichen, Outerbridge was among the most acclaimed of avant-garde photographers. In the 1930s his alluring, richly colored pictures of consumer products made him New York’s highest paid commercial photographer. But tastes in art and advertising changed, and from the ’40s to the ’70s, he practically disappeared from public view, a nearly forgotten man. In his 1973 book, “Looking at Photographs,” John Szarkowski, the Museum of Modern Art’s longtime director of photography, judged his later works to be mere “commercial illustrations.”
