Turbeville’s affinity for the antique and the decayed also extended to her use of alternate photographic processes and techniques. Even among the manicured gardens of Versailles or the marble statues of L’Ecole de Beaux-Arts, Turbeville turns the elegant lines and forms into mysteries, where time seems to stop and the grand ruins play host to models largely uninterested in the camera.
And Turbeville’s now famous bathers wash themselves in a grimy tile bathhouse, steeped in eerie emptiness and dark shadows. Others recline in decaying greenhouses with artfully broken windows, or wander through dusty abandoned apartments, silhouetted against bright windows like melancholy phantoms. Prim women in white dresses stand in the woods like survivors of some unmentioned horror. Models are lost in blowing tangles of hair that nearly obscure their expressionless, lost-in-thought faces. Many of Turbeville’s best images have an expressive, haunted quality. Compared to the brash pre-packaged male-centric eroticism that dominated fashion both then and to some extent even now, her hazy, dreamlike pictures seemed to have come from another world entirely. As seen in this well-edited survey of some of her most personal projects and commissions, her hand-crafted photographs were singularly about the richness of atmosphere, each staged scene filled with a dark theatricality that seemed to evoke layers of buried thoughts and emotions that were rooted in the feminine perspective.
Turbeville’s approach to fashion was uniquely psychological, with a for-women by-women interest in the amorphous terrain of femininity that lay underneath the commercial choices of dresses and shoes. Although she was shooting for most of the same top magazines as her contemporaries (including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and many others), her moody aesthetic was distinctly and overtly contrarian – not only did it defy the pervasive aesthetic of sleek objectified sexiness that was everywhere (particularly in the imagery of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin), it hardly even bothered to show the clothes that were the ostensible subject of the pictures. Comments/Context: Deborah Turbeville’s fashion photographs from the 1970s and 1980s didn’t look like the kind of pictures anyone else was making at the time.
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