Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896–1958) burst onto the photographic art scene in the early 1920s with images that were visually fresh, technically adept, and decidedly Modernist. He also applied his talent for composition to the commercial world, introducing an artist’s sensibility to advertisements for men’s haberdashery, glassware, and JELL-O® for magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair. An early master of the technically complex carbro color process, he used it to photograph nudes, often shown with a variety of props—images that skirted the limits of propriety in their day.
 This catalogue was produced for the first exhibition of Outerbridge’s work since 1981, which was held March 31 through August 9, 2009, at the J. Paul Getty Museum. It brought together one hundred photographs from all periods and styles of the photographer’s career, including his Cubistic still-life images, commercial magazine photography, and nudes. The book includes an essay by the curator and a chronology of the artist’s life and work.

Paul Outerbridge: Command Performance

Arts & Photography

Martineau, Paul

Individual Artists

J.paul Getty Museum

Still life is one of the great traditional art forms. The first still-life photograph was created around 1827, more than a decade before the news of photography’s invention was announced in Paris and London in 1839. This volume surveys some of the innovative ways photographers have explored the traditional genre of still life from photography’s earliest years to the present day.
The introductory essay is followed by an illuminating sequence and juxtaposition of plates selected from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection. Still life has served as both a conventional and an experimental form during periods of significant aesthetic and technological change. Illustrating that here are nineteenth-century masterpieces by practitioners such as Hippolyte Bayard and Roger Fenton, twentieth-century examples that include the diverse styles of Baron Adolph de Meyer, Irving Penn, and Edward Weston, and a sampling of contemporary artists, some recalling styles from the past. The current revival of interest in the genre comes as the digital age is transforming the medium.

Still Life in Photography

Photography & Video

Herb Ritts: L.A. Style traces the life and career of the iconic photographer through a compelling selection of renowned, as well as previously unpublished, photographs and two insightful essays. Herb Ritts (1952–2002) was a Los Angeles-based photographer who established an international reputation for distinctive images of fashion models, nudes, and celebrity portraits. During the 1980s and 1990s, Ritts was sought out by leading fashion designers such as Armani, Gianfranco Ferrè, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Valentino, and Versace, as well as magazine editors from GQ, Interview, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair, among others, to lend glamour to their products and layouts. Largely self-taught, Ritts developed his own style, one that often made use of the California light and landscape and helped to separate his work from his New York-based peers. From the late 1970s until his untimely death from AIDS in 2002, Ritts’s ability to create photographs that successfully bridged the gap between art and commerce was not only a testament to the power of his imagination and technical skill, but also marked the synergistic union between art, popular culture, and business that followed in the wake of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
An exhibition of the same name will be on view at the Getty Center from April 3 through August 12, 2012; at the Cincinnati Art Museum from October 6 through December 30, 2012; and at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, from February 23 through May 19, 2013.

Herb Ritts: L.A. Style

Known for his exquisite images of birds and landscape, Eliot Porter (American, 1901–1990) was a pioneer in the use of color photography. His work also became a powerful visual argument for environmental conservation. Trained as a medical doctor and possessing a scientist's gift for close observation, Porter explored new ways of depicting nature, building blinds in trees so he could study his avian subjects at closer vantage, and producing landscape images that capture both pristine forest and ragged river canyons with equal force and brilliance. Initially encouraged by the groundbreaking photographers Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz, Porter went on to produce a body of work all his own. His 1962 Sierra Club book In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, with its images grouped by season and accompanied by quotations from Henry David Thoreau, transformed the concept of nature photography books. Ultimately, Porter's photographs came to the attention of Congress and led to the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, the foundational law in wilderness management today.Eliot Porter: In the Realm of Nature contains 110 images from the collections of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser; the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; and of the J. Paul Getty Museum, along with an essay by Paul Martineau that discusses Porter's life and the innovations he brought to the practice of photography.

Eliot Porter: In the Realm of Nature

Born like Venus on the half shell from the centuries-long tradition of the nude in painting, the nude first appeared as a subject matter in photography with the introduction of the medium itself, between 1837 and 1840, and has continued as an ever-evolving theme through changing technical developments and cultural mores to the present day. This volume surveys the subject of nudity from the earliest surviving photographs of Greek and Roman sculpture through studies of living nude models for aesthetic or scientific purposes to the burgeoning practice of exploring the human body as pure form. The seventy-eight works, selected from the extensive collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum and further contextualized here in the essay “Masterworks of the Nude,” span the entire arc of the history of photography in a manner that is both fresh and illuminating. Among the sixty-four photographers included are nineteenth-century masters Julia Margaret Cameron, Edgar Degas, and Thomas Eakins; early-twentieth-century artists Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston; mid-twentieth-century innovators Bill Brandt, Harry Callahan, and Minor White; late-twentieth-century image makers Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Herb Ritts; and contemporary artists Chuck Close, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, and Mona Kuhn.

The Nude in Photography (Getty Publications – (Yale))

Controversial, misunderstood, and sometimes overlooked, Minor White (1908–1976) is one of the great photographers of the twentieth century, whose ideas exerted a powerful influence on a generation of photographers and still resonate today. His photographic career began in 1938 in Portland, Oregon, with assignments for the WPA (Works Progress Administration). After serving in World War II and studying art history at Columbia University, White’s focus shifted toward the metaphorical. He began creating images charged with symbolism and a critical aspect called equivalency, referring to the invisible spiritual energy present in a photograph made visible to the viewer. This book brings together White’s key biographical information―his evolution as a photographer, teacher of photography, and editor of Aperture, as well as particularly insightful quotations from his journals, which he kept for more than forty years. The result is an engaging narrative that weaves through the main threads of White’s life, his growth as an artist, as well as his spiritual search and ongoing struggle with his own sexuality and self-doubt. He sought comfort in a variety of religious practices that influenced his continually metamorphosing artistic philosophy. Complemented with a rich selection of more than 160 images including some never published before, the book accompanies the first major exhibition of White’s work since 1989, on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from July 8 to October 19, 2014.

Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit

Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. (1921–1987) amassed an extraordinary collection of 26,000 photographs between 1973 and 1984, recognizing that photography was an undervalued art form on which he might have a profound impact as a collector. He was mainly attracted to photographs that stimulated his imagination, and his taste ran toward the idiosyncratic—images that surprised him chiefly because he had never seen them before. In choosing the 147 works reproduced in this volume, Paul Martineau selected masterpieces as well as images from obscure sources: daguerreotypes, cartes-de-visite, and stereographs, plus mug shots, medical photographs, and works by unknown makers. The latter category contains some of the most outstanding objects in the collection, demonstrating Wagstaff’s willingness to position unfamiliar images alongside works by established masters as well as underrepresented contemporary artists of the time, including Jo Ann Callis, William Garnett, and Edmund Teske. This book is published to accompany an eponymous exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from March 15 to July 31, 2016; at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, from September 10 to December 11, 2016; and at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, ME, from February 1 to April 30, 2017.

The Thrill of the Chase: The Wagstaff Collection of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum

This fascinating collection of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs contains over 250 striking images — from florals to portraits from nudes to still lifes, as well as images from his controversial X Portfolio 
“…an indispensable publication of lasting significance…”—ARTFIXdaily 
“Authoritative and indispensable.”—Bay Area Reporter 
The legacy of Robert Mapplethorpe (1946 –1989) is rich and complicated, triggering controversy, polarizing critics, and providing inspiration for many artists who followed him. Mapplethorpe taught himself about the history of art, how to run a studio, how to network, and how to keep the public interested in him. At the same time, he honed a distinctive individual vision based on craftsmanship and an aesthetic of classical grace. One of the most influential figures of his time, today Mapplethorpe stands as an example to emerging photographers who continue to test boundaries and concepts of the beautiful. Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs offers a timely and rewarding examination of his oeuvre and influence. Drawing from the extraordinary collection jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, as well as the Mapplethorpe Archive housed at the Getty Research Institute, the authors were given the unique opportunity to explore new resources and present fresh perspectives. The result is a fascinating exploration of Mapplethorpe’s career and legacy, with in-depth essays on sexuality and identity, all accompanied by more than 250 striking images covering the remarkable range of his photographic work – from florals to portraits from nudes to still lifes, as well as the controversial X Portfolio. All of these beautifully integrated elements contribute to what is an essential point of access to Mapplethorpe’s work and practice.

Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs

Salvesen, Britt

In 1911 the French publisher Lucien Vogel challenged Edward Steichen to create the first artistic, rather than merely documentary, fashion photographs, a moment that is now considered to be a turning point in the history of fashion photography. As fashion changed over the next century, so did the photography of fashion. Steichen’s modernist approach was forthright and visually arresting. In the 1930s the photographer Martin Munkácsi pioneered a gritty, photojournalistic style. In the 1960s Richard Avedon encouraged his models to express their personalities by smiling and laughing, which had often been discouraged previously. Helmut Newton brought an explosion of sexuality into fashion images and turned the tables on traditional gender stereotypes in the 1970s, and in the 1980s Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts made male sexuality an important part of fashion photography. Today, following the integration of digital technology, teams like Inez &amp; Vinoodh and Mert &amp; Marcus are reshaping our notion of what is acceptable—not just aesthetically but also technically and conceptually—in a fashion photograph. This lavishly illustrated survey of one hundred years of fashion photography updates and reevaluates this history in five chronological chapters by experts in photography and fashion history. It includes more than three hundred photographs by the genre’s most famous practitioners as well as important but lesser-known figures, alongside a selection of costumes, fashion illustrations, magazine covers, and advertisements.

Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Thoroughly researched and beautifully produced, this catalogue complements the first comprehensive retrospective in the United States of Imogen Cunningham's work in over thirty-five years. Celebrated American artist Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) enjoyed a long career as a photographer, creating a large and diverse body of work that underscored her unique vision, versatility, and commitment to the medium. An early feminist and inspiration to future generations, Cunningham intensely engaged with Pictorialism and Modernism; genres of portraiture, landscape, the nude, still life, and street photography; and themes such as flora, dancers and music, hands, and the elderly. Organized chronologically, this volume explores the full range of the artist's life and career. It contains nearly two hundred color images of Cunningham's elegant, poignant, and groundbreaking photographs, both renowned and lesser known, including several that have not been published previously. Essays by Paul Martineau and Susan Ehrens draw from extensive primary source material such as letters, family albums, and other intimate materials to enrich readers' understanding of Cunningham's motivations and work. &nbsp;

Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective

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