Paul Outerbridge: New Color Photographs from Mexico and California, 1948-1955
The first book to publish a previously unknown body of color work that Paul Outerbridge made in California and Mexico between 1948 and 1955.
The photographs were shot on Kodachrome after Outerbridge left the studio for the street. He crossed the border in a 1949 black Cadillac and worked in the seaport towns of the Baja peninsula, photographing people at weddings, pool parties and picture spots, from governors to gauchos and stevedores to bathing beauties. Graham Howe, Outerbridge's biographer, contributes the introduction, and the curators William A. Ewing and Phillip Prodger write the preface and essay. Nazraeli Press published the book in 2009 with Curatorial Assistance, which toured a matching exhibition.
Outerbridge (1896-1958) built his reputation in the 1930s on carbro color prints of nudes and still lifes made mostly in the studio. These later pictures show him working outdoors in a looser, documentary mode, in colour that the publisher says anticipated the bold palettes of photographers a quarter century later.
