Paul Outerbridge, A Singular Aesthetic: Photographs & Drawings, 1921-1941: A Catalogue Raisonné

Paul Outerbridge, A Singular Aesthetic is the catalogue raisonné that restored a founder of American modernist photography to full view, gathering the photographs and drawings he made between 1921 and 1941.

Edited by Elaine Dines in collaboration with Graham Howe, with an introductory essay by Bernard Barryte, the book accompanied an exhibition organized by the Laguna Beach Museum of Art in 1981. Across 238 pages it documents Outerbridge's commercial and personal work in black-and-white and in the tricolor carbro color process he helped pioneer, including advertising still lifes, portraits, and the sharply composed tabletop arrangements built from geometric forms and everyday objects that became his signature.

Outerbridge (1896-1958) trained at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York before becoming one of the first photographers to bring modernist composition into commercial advertising, most famously in his 1922 Ide collar advertisement. He later worked in Paris and London in circles that included Man Ray, and spent his final decades in Laguna Beach, California, as a portrait photographer and color consultant. This catalogue remains a primary reference for his body of work.