Abstract Eroticism: Exploring the nude photography of Paul Outerbridge
Paul Outerbridge was born in 1896. This simple fact alone makes his career as a photographer somewhat pioneering. However, he wasn’t content with merely capturing coloured images, the artist had his eyes set on something far more abstract than that: turning the lens into a paintbrush of sorts.
Thus, he set about snapping sliced avocados in all sorts of interesting ways. However, the most difficult feat of all would surely be somehow transforming the human form into something artfully abstract. Never one to shy away from a challenge, Outerbridge set about turning skin into art in an erotic fashion.
As he decreed the mantra behind his flesh-flashing ways: “Nudity is a state of fact; lewdity, to coin a phrase, is a state of mind.” He wanted to be daring with his brushstrokes like an innovative Edouard Manet of photography. And much like that French master, he was happy to shrug off controversy too.
As he happily declared when conservatives pointed their spikes, “If exposure of a nude body is thought to incite relations between the sexes, well, what of it. We want a large population anyway.” He was easygoing about exposure, it was all part of the art.
And that much is borne out in the way he viewed the ideal eroticism. “The nude should be relatively impersonal, and a fatal error is to have a model establish too personal or intimate contact with the person viewing the picture,” he opined. It’s an interesting approach, but it also proves palpable in his pictures.
Mildly absurd and always oddly angular, these are snapshots of the postmodernist moment that technology began to shift the sort of things we hung on gallery walls. If the abstract painters said what’s the point of realism when a camera can depict a scene almost perfectly, Outerbridge followed their train of thought and said what’s the point of depicting things perfectly with a camera when you can leave that to the eyes and capture them abstractly
The abstract erotic photography of Paul Outerbridge:
