Torso

Outerbridge worked as a painter and set designer before becoming one of the most influential advertising photographers of his era. Although he would go on to perfect the luxurious and technologically advanced carbro color process in the following decades, his work of the 1920s tended toward simple, elegant compositions and Cubist abstractions. Here, Outerbridge isolates a woman’s nude torso so that it fills the entire frame. The photograph both looks back to Outerbridge’s training at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York, where he had studied two years prior, and ahead to the increasingly sensual and erotic nudes of his later career.