http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/09/arts/design/always-something-unnerving-in-paul-outerbridge-photographs.html 2016-09-09 00:08:46 Always Something Unnerving in Paul Outerbridge Photographs The peculiar career of this acclaimed avant-garde artist is well-served by a museum-caliber retrospective at Bruce Silverstein Gallery. === 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 In the 1920s, along with Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and his chief rival, Edward Steichen, But tastes changed again, and today, thanks to the popularity of color in art photography that began in the ’70s (color was regarded as tacky before that) and the focus on photographic artifice later proffered by artists like Cindy Sherman, Gregory Crewdson and Christopher Williams, Outerbridge has re-emerged as one of the 20th century’s most intriguing photographers. The exhibition of 41 prints makes no distinction between Outerbridge’s commercial assignments and his fine-art works. In many cases, it’s hard to tell the difference. No matter what the impetus, he brought to bear on each effort a kind of photographic perfect pitch. Consider Appropriately, the exhibition also mixes styles, for Outerbridge was a photographic chameleon. His earliest works were in the paintinglike manner of The show’s most unusual, and, in a way, most instructive image is “Self-Portrait” (1927), a deliberately blurred and distorted, black-and-white picture of the mustachioed artist in a tuxedo, top hat, mask and white gloves. This is the photographer not as a truth-telling documentarian but as a weaver of fantasies, a possibly evil, certainly decadent sorcerer. You might imagine this mischievous fellow to be the creative persona behind the female nudes that Outerbridge produced in the 1930s, fetishistic, borderline-kinky pictures of which there are several in the show. Although contemporary standards of decorum wouldn’t allow him to exhibit such pictures, Outerbridge invested a lot of time and effort in them. Today they seem more comical than pornographic, yet there is something unsettling in them, a deeply personal undercurrent of Freudian pathos. Had Outerbridge been born a few generations later and become a filmmaker, he would have been a Stanley Kubrick or a David Lynch. “First Robin of Spring” (1938), for example, is weirdly ominous despite its ostensibly cheerful subject. It offers a view of the titular bird perched on one of the black branches of a blossoming fruit tree with an intensely blue sky above and the roof of an old, white, clapboard-sided house low in the background. With its slightly burned, saturated color, it’s like a horror film still, calling to mind Also Lynchian is “Father and Son in Kitchen” (1941), the exhibition’s last-dated piece, in which two men enjoy sugar-dusted doughnuts and glasses of milk. They’re chuckling over a handwritten note attached to a cupboard door that reads, “Gone to Bed/ Prowlers Welcome” and signed, “Mother.” They’re amused because of course there can be no evildoers about in such a comfy, Norman Rockwell-esque setting. But this is Outerbridge’s world, where there is always something unnerving lurking just beyond the pale of the visible.