Deborah Turbeville: Biography
Deborah Turbeville: Past Imperfect (Book Flip Through) from The Curious Cat Library YouTube channel
Deborah Turbeville was born on 6 July 1932 in Stoneham, Massachusetts, into a prosperous New England family that valued intellectual refinement and lived in a certain isolation, in a large house on the outskirts of Boston. Cobbled streets, snow, tinted windows and summers in Maine stayed with her as a lifelong store of images. She grew up close to theatre, dance and literature, and moved to New York before turning twenty with the stage in mind. Her path changed when the designer Claire McCardell noticed her and hired her as assistant and house model. Through McCardell she met Diana Vreeland, who brought her to Harper’s Bazaar as an editor, a role she later continued at Mademoiselle.
Editorial work soon left her restless. In the 1960s she bought a Pentax and began to experiment, and in 1966 she was admitted to the workshop led by Richard Avedon and art director Marvin Israel, who encouraged her to photograph full time. Her career gained real momentum only around her fortieth birthday. The turning point came in 1975 with Bathhouse, a swimwear editorial for American Vogue commissioned by Alexander Liberman. Five models lean listlessly against the walls of a derelict New York bathhouse. Readers reacted with outrage, reading the women as drug addicts and the room as a death chamber. Turbeville described it as a practical problem of fitting five girls across a double page spread.
From the late 1970s Carla Sozzani invited her to Vogue Italia, which began a collaboration lasting over thirty years and earned her the nickname “photographer of the dream”. She worked for Valentino, Comme des Garçons, Calvin Klein and many others. Her books include Wallflower (1979), Unseen Versailles (1981), commissioned by Jacqueline Onassis and awarded an American Book Award, Newport Remembered (1994) and Studio St. Petersburg (1997). She divided her time between New York, San Miguel de Allende in Mexico and St Petersburg, where a Fulbright grant took her in 2002. She also wrote a novella, Passport, which she developed into a series of collages. She died of lung cancer in New York on 24 October 2013, aged 81. Her work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the V&A, the Centre Pompidou and the Getty, and the recent Photocollage retrospective, shown at Huis Marseille and The Photographers’ Gallery, has brought her archive back into view.
Approach and Technique
From Fashion Editor to Fashion Photographer - Curator Nathalie Herschdorfer on Deborah Turbeville from SHOWstudio YouTube channel
Turbeville never considered herself a fashion photographer. Clothes were a pretext, often appearing only fleetingly in the frame, while her real subject was atmosphere and mood. In the 1970s, when Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin pushed fashion toward provocation and an urban erotic underworld, she moved the other way, toward something dreamy, melancholic and withdrawn. Many consider hers a distinctly female gaze.
Her models explain much of this. She looked for faces suggesting a rich inner life, often women who did not see themselves as models and needed persuading. She posed them in states close to lethargy, absorbed in thought, with lowered eyes and no contact with the lens or with each other. Turbeville admitted she was frightened of people and said that this unease surfaces in her pictures. She wanted every print to keep a trace of the feeling that something is wrong. Of her intent she said: “I go into a woman’s private world, where you never go.”
The locations carry the same weight. She sought crumbling bathhouses, shuttered palace rooms, faded Newport mansions, misty winter woods and the decadent calm of Venice. In Unseen Versailles she photographed furniture and sculpture half hidden under dust sheets, in natural light, almost without people. Decay was her natural setting, and she even kept her own homes in a state of gentle ruin.
Technically, her signature look combines grain, soft focus and overexposure, with sepia tints, pastel colours or black and white. Early viewers sometimes took the blur for a mistake. Franca Sozzani recalled that art directors complained about out of focus shots, which for Turbeville were the way to make the world feel otherworldly.
The deeper work happened after the shutter. In the darkroom, with her collaborator Sharon Schuster, she scratched, tore, burned and taped her prints, and often rephotographed and reprinted them. The doubled edges visible in some images reveal these repeated passages. The result was a patina of age on brand new pictures. She summed up her method with a blunt statement: “I destroy the image after I’ve made it.” Disintegration, in her words, sat at the heart of her work.
Her collages pushed this further. She pinned prints with T pins onto heavy brown paper, arranging contact sheets, notes and found objects like pages of a storyboard. The stories stay open and incomplete, like fragments of dreams, and Passport shows how cinematic and narrative her thinking could be.
Personal Considerations
Spotlight on Otherworldly: Deborah Turbeville Photographs from The Image Centre YouTube channel
Coming to Deborah Turbeville after Hans Bellmer felt refreshing. My reaction grows even stronger when I think of the other photographers I covered in this series who worked in her years. They chose straight photography, harsh contrast and sharply defined images, often with a distinct erotic atmosphere. Her pictures, instead, are distant, out of focus, disrupted and rebuilt, and she often shot them in dilapidated places. For me they were a breath of fresh air that revitalized my spirit.
Her images are timeless. They look antique, yet nobody can say exactly when they were taken. A picture made yesterday could pass for a nineteenth century Pictorialist print, and still she worked so close to our own time.
I also find it fascinating that this way of shooting lived, flourished and was accepted in the New York fashion world of the 1970s and 80s, surrounded by the influence of Andy Warhol, the work of Helmut Newton and the feverish activity of Robert Mapplethorpe. Francesca Woodman, who worked with a comparable visual sensibility, never found a place in that environment, and she took her own life in 1981. Turbeville reached it by a different road and became successful and influential well beyond the Atlantic.
It surprises me that so many art nude photographers today remember Newton from the 80s and forget her. That is a real loss.
So: defocus. Dilapidate. Make collages. Capture mood and atmosphere. Say something about yourself and your life. Sexual content can be powerful, and I do not doubt it, yet a man with my personal history knows there is more to tell than sex alone.
Study and appreciate Deborah Turbeville, among the others, and grow up. Use photography to express emotions, ideas, wounds and traumas, because this is what keeps your work safe. Generative AI will crush anyone who only repeats a formula. You have been warned!
Shine on!