Nicholas Robinson Gallery presents Detroit, a new series of photographs by collaborative artists McDermott and McGough. It is the first completely new body of photographs by the artists in over 15 years, the first exhibition devoted solely to their photographic work in New York since 1992, and their first ever suite of images to utilize an historic color [polychrome] developing process.

Comprising 20 images, the works are printed in the tri-color carbro process, a process of tremendous complexity, subtlety, and archival durability, refined and perfected by Paul Outerbridge in the 1930s. One of the seminal figures of 20th Century photography, Outerbridge experimented with the medium until he had mastered it completely. The vibrancy of his color pictures was both admired and envied, and it resulted in his being pursued by the burgeoning advertising community to use color images in the promotion of consumer products. He was unique amongst his peers in that he utilized these developments in color in his own creative studio work.

Detroit seeks to tackle themes of social repression in America of the late 1950s, and particularly the petit-bourgeois suburbia of the artists’ childhoods. The works encapsulate an America in its post-war, pre-pop moment. The subjects are trapped in ennui, lost in longing daydreams, and searching for connections with people and social environments that lie outside the framework of their own nuclear family – connections promised by the exciting possibilities afforded by the telephone, the television, and the gossip magazines that began to disseminate America’s fascination with celebrity. These photographs posit an American ‘still-life’ of ubiquitous small-town locations. The subjects display varying degrees of innocence, knowingness and longing, evoking feelings of alienation, isolation, and disconnection from hetero-normative normalcy. Typical of McDermott and McGoughs’ work, these images explore various tropes of historical reconstruction, identifying the various sources of sexual tension that could be read ‘between the lines’ in that historical moment. 1958 is both the year that Paul Outerbridge Jr. died, and the year of McGough’s birth.

The works were shot on location at The Henry Ford Museum in Michigan, an eponymous repository of material culture, built by the auto tycoon in the late 1920s. Conceived as Ford’s vision to document the genius of ordinary people by preserving the objects they used in the course of their everyday lives, it grew to become one of the largest collections of its kind ever assembled. Premised upon rigorous historical accuracy the Museum celebrates the development of post-Industrial America through authentic objects, stories, and traditions of ingenuity, resourcefulness and innovation.

A fully illustrated color publication accompanies the exhibition, with essay by Steven Pinson, curator of the photography collection at the New York Public Library, and foreword by John Ashbery.