Paul Outerbridge started in photography later in life, but nonetheless, he became an accomplished photographer who mastered the ever complex tricolor carbon printing process. His abilities with the view finder were so strong that Vanity Fair published two of his photographs prior to his graduation from The Clarence H. White School of Photography. As a student, Paul Outerbridge was heavily influenced by art, both classical and modern. Always with a meticulous approach to photography, Outerbridge used to sketch his ideas before arranging objects or models in the studio. He was a photographer very sensitive to design fundamentals, which allowed him to explore his ideas similar to a modernist painter.
Outerbridge made a strong influence on the advertising industry of late 20s and 30s as he focused on the still life, the nude and stage photography. He worked for very well-known agencies and magazines of the time; while in Paris, he revitalized his bohemian life style and became a close friend to Man Ray, a Dadaist photographer who influenced his later work. Outerbridge was also well acquainted with Marcel Ducamp, a leading figure in modern art.
With the invention of kodachrome transparencies, Outerbridge saw his career as an active photographer suffer. He wrote several articles for photographic journals and even published a manual on color photography that became a must read for the serious photographer. What follows is a quote from Paul Outerbridge, Command Performance, a book written by Paul Martineau that motivated me to write this post, and is truly a delightful reading.

During the thirties and fourties, Paul Outerbridge was a famous and successful commercial photographer, noted especially for the high quality of his color illustrations, which were done in those years by means of an extremely complex and recalcitrant process called the carbo print. In all the arts, work that is praised when new because of its difficulty is often forgotten once the technical problem has been simplified. Such is the case with most color photography of a century ago, including that of Outerbridge.