The bravura platinum print offered here of Paul Outerbridge’s iconic Ide Collar exemplifies his tour-de-force talent of transforming quotidian objects into Modernist masterpieces. A masterful and exacting printer, Outerbridge has fully exploited the wide tonal range of the platinum process. With untrimmed margins, deep charcoal blacks, and crisp bright highlights, this print features all of the photographic qualities and precise detail characteristic of Outerbridge’s best photographs. Extant prints of Ide Collar are exceedingly rare.

Ide Collar was made relatively early in Outerbridge’s career, just a year after beginning his studies in 1921 at the Clarence White School in New York, where he embarked upon a series of still-life studies that came to define his career. Photographs such as Saw and Square (1921), Ide Collar (1922), and Marmon Crankshaft (1923) demonstrate Outerbridge’s innate talent for compositional arrangements and lighting. Ide Collar was the result of his first of many successful commercial assignments, which, by the 1930s, would earn him acclaim as the highest paid photographer in New York.

Outerbridge made this photograph for the George P. Ide Collar Company. Founded in 1865 and based in Troy, NY, the manufacturer of shirts, collars, and cuffs became one of the premiere names in the industry. At its peak, the company generated annual revenue of $3.5 million. A sharp decline in the popularity of detachable collars forced the company to liquidate assets in 1933.

While the standard advertising approach at this t.mes prescribed photographing a model bedecked in Ide Company products, Outerbridge took the bold, unprecedented step to focus instead on the collar itself, making the object seem almost monumental. Set against a checkered background, the object defies a sense of scale. Like Marmon Crankshaft, Ide Collar simultaneously abstracts and celebrates its subject matter.

First published in the November 1922 issue of Vanity Fair, Outerbridge’s Ide Collar redefined the role of photography in advertising, where straightforward, descriptive images of merchandise had been the norm.

The advertisement in Vanity Fair presented Outerbridge’s image without accompanying text. An Ide Company advertisement that ran a few months later took a more humorous approach to the image, captioning Outerbridge’s photograph as follows: ‘In pleasant contrast to the checkered careers of more radical designs is the pointed conservatism of the new starched Idestyle collar.’ (published in The New York Herald, 6 November 1922, p. 11)

In a story oft-repeated, Marcel Duchamp was said to have clipped Ide Collar from Vanity Fair and tacked it to his wall as an example of the inspired readymades for which he was known. Indeed, in Ide Collar there are elements of Cubism and abstraction comparable to the work of Juan Gris that further elevate Outerbridge’s photograph beyond the realm of advertising.

Even though the First World War made platinum scarce, Outerbridge felt strongly that his photographs were most successfully printed with the platinum process. For this reason, he printed even the best of his images in very limited quantities. Only a handful of platinum prints of Ide Collar have been located, including in the collects ions of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Replica Handbags s, Houston; The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon collects ion at the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art; and The Sir Elton John collects ion. A gelatin silver print of the image is in The Ford Motor Company collects ion at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.