By turns luxe and austere, sometimes both in the same image, the work of Paul Outerbridge occupies a special vantage in the sleek, vexed space between modernism and Madison Avenue. In the black-and-white Ide Collar (1922), which was made the year he began photographing for Vogue, a detached white shirt collar—a svelte size fourteen and three-quarters—sits alone on a checker-board surface. The picture is part New Realist severity, part found object or readymade (Marcel Duchamp tacked a copy on his studio wall), and wholly expressive of the venerating isolation that has been essential to product photography since its inception in the 1850s. In Outerbridge’s later advertising work, especially the color carbro prints for which he is now best known, a busier style of composition dominates. But objects still float in opulent detachment; in a series of advertisements for “petal soft” Scott toilet paper from the late 1930s, the product unrolls among jewellike flowers on plain-colored backgrounds.
Outerbridge is one of the few photographers working in the early twentieth
