Haunted Beauty : Photographer Deborah Turbeville

An exhibition of collages by Deborah Turbeville (American, 1932-2013) is on view at Deborah Bell Photographs through Saturday, June 29. This is the first exhibition devoted solely to Turbeville’s collages.

Turbeville is known for her iconoclastic fashion photographs, elaborate tableaux that depict brooding, introspective models wearing haute-couture clothing and posed in barren, desolate settings. Her pictures were widely published in the editorial pages of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Essence, Nova, Mirabella, The New York Times Magazine, and other major publications.

Advertising clients included Comme des Garçons, Ralph Lauren, Valentino and Calvin Klein; and department stores such as Barney’s, Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue.

A former fashion editor for the The Ladies Home Journal, Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle, Turbeville began taking photographs in the 1960s; however, she had no formal training until 1966 when she enrolled in a six-month photography workshop given by Richard Avedon and the art director Marvin Israel. As Turbeville told The New York Times in 1981, “If it hadn’t been for the two of them, I wouldn’t have taken my photography seriously.” Another mentor was Gösta Peterson, whose free-form approach with animated models greatly inspired Turbeville. She also acknowledged the influence of European films of the 1970s, especially those by Bertolucci and Antonioni.

Turbeville began to create books and exhibitions of her prints and collages in the late 1970s. Her first book, Wallflower, was designed by Marvin Israel and published in 1978. Shortly before this, in the spring of 1977, Turbeville was beginning to exhibit her photographs at Sonnabend Gallery in New York. Israel’s considerable influence on Turbeville’s work, and his layout of her pictures in Wallflower, led Turbeville to proclaim, in later years, “Marvin Israel made me.” He encouraged her to use tape and t-pins in assembling her collages, and to treat her prints as anything but precious. She re-assembled contact sheets and used masking tape around the 35mm frames to identify her preferred exposures. Sometimes two pictures are layered or overlapping in a collage, as if it were a work in progress. Turbeville’s acute attention to the mood of a place, the nuance of facial expression and body language, and her innovative cropping of the image she saw through her camera, are all accentuated in the serial imagery of her collages.

Turbeville was not only prolific and internationally published as an image-maker, but was also a maverick printmaker. She used unusual papers, experimented with toning and alternative processes, and intentionally scratched her negatives, striving to imbue her prints and collages with a sense of decay and timelessness.

Variants of some of the collages reproduced in Wallflower will be on view in the exhibition, such as those utilizing images from “stories” now referred to as Dummy Factory (1974), Glass House (1978), and Women in the Woods (1978). Of special note is a collage of rare photographs that Turbeville took in Kenya in 1992 while on assignment for Mirabella with the renowned fashion editor Jade Hobson, in which Turbeville’s pictures of Hobson are juxtaposed with portraits of the wildlife photographer Carol Cawthra Hopcraft and scenes of the people, animals, and daily life on Hopcraft’s ranch.

Turbeville describes her philosophy in the introduction to Wallflower:

“Through a series of vignettes in stills, I wish to use the medium of photography to explain a group of rather eccentric people – sometimes one or two, sometimes many – placed in settings that help describe them. These people perform like a repertory company, often reappearing in different roles. … My pictures walk a tightrope. They never know. … I am one of the very few “enfants terrible” still claiming to take fashion photography. I am not a fashion photographer, I am not a photo-journalist, I am not a portraitist.”

Throughout her career Turbeville traveled widely and concentrated on many themes in addition to fashion. In addition to Wallflower, the many books she published from her oeuvre include Women on Women (1979); Unseen Versailles (1982); Les amoureuses du temps passé (1987); Newport Remembered with Louis Auchincloss (1994); Studio St. Petersburg (1997); Le passé imparfait (2009); Casa No Name (2009); and Deborah Turbeville: The Fashion Pictures (2011). Turbeville’s photographs have been acquired by institutions worldwide including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

This exhibition is presented in association with Staley-Wise Gallery, New York.

Deborah Turbeville : Collages. The Eye of Photography ,  May 7, 2019

Seeing a woman eerily moving down a staircase in darkness perhaps invokes more Ingmar Bergman than Italian Vogue, but that sort of moodiness is what fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville was known for. In the world of 1970s fashion, when images that highly sexualized women were de rigeur, Turbeville entered with an anti-fashion sensibility. Instead of suggestive shots of sexy women in gorgeous clothes, Turbeville’s works were dark, emotive landscapes that just happened to feature fine attire.

Though Turbeville had worked in fashion for decades by the time she became a photographer — she started out as designer Claire McCardell’s assistant and fit model, then became an editor at places like Harper’s Bazaar, Ladies’ Home Journal, and the now-defunct Mademoiselle — she despised the fashion world. “It’s seeing all those people who you’ve seen for years, who’ve spent fifty years of their lives just looking at clothes,” she said, according to Michael Gross’s 2016 fashion photography tome Focus. “I mean, I’ve got nothing against them. It’s not really a feminist point; it’s just that I don’t want to be there.”

Turbeville picked up a camera in the first place because, as a fashion editor, she was having trouble finding someone to execute the visions she hoped for. Mentored by fashion photography luminaries like Richard Avedon and Bob Richardson, Turbeville soon began shooting her own work full time, leaving the editorial world behind. Rejecting the glossy, sexualized, and female-commodifying style of popular ’70s photographers like Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, Turbeville’s work instead turned inward. “It is the psychological tone and mood that I work for,” she says in Gross’s book. This began with her game-changing “Bathhouse” series for American Vogue in 1975, in which thin, wan women lean moodily against the spare, cracked walls of an abandoned bathhouse. This series established the ideal Turbeville woman to be mysterious yet romantically isolated, almost like a Brontë heroine, walking with a vulnerable power across decayed, derelict settings. There is a sullen glamour, a weightiness and sadness to these subjects that purposely counters Newton’s or Bourdin’s fantasies. Turbeville showed herself to be a woman who sees women as they are — and often in their darkest moments — not as others dream or desire them to be. A selection of these images are now on view in Staley-Wise Gallery’s exhibition, Deborah Turbeville: Photographs 1977–1981.

This show includes selections from Turbeville’s shoots for Italian Vogue, American Vogue, and others, as well as projects for Valentino, Rochas, and Comme des Garçons. The latter is particularly interesting because the Metropolitan Museum of Art is concurrently hosting its Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between exhibition through the Costume Institute, and much of the language in that exhibition’s literature, used to describe Kawakubo and her designs, could also be applied to Turbeville. Kawakubo has, the Met writes, “an aesthetic sensibility that establishes an unsettling zone of visual ambiguity and elusiveness,” and “she upends conventional notions of beauty and disrupts accepted characteristics of the fashionable body.” These ideas are present in Turbeville’s work as well, and the magnetism of their pairing is evident in the images the photographer shot of the designer’s work throughout the 1980s.

Turbeville’s images featuring Comme des Garçons attire from the 1980 Passage Vivienne series are particularly representative of Turbeville and Kawakubo’s overlapping ideals. One photograph shows models cloaked in black, one with a dark veil atop her head, staring blankly, bleakly into the distance while hovering on an elegant yet aged and battered staircase. Another casts them in shadow as a blast of light beams behind them. Vignetting creeps darkness into the corners of the images, separating the scene into pockets of light. The clothing is just barely visible, the photos purposely grainy and unfocused. For Turbeville as much as Kawakubo, these images are not about capital-F Fashion, but about cultivating a particular mood, tone, and ambiguity. It’s not just fashion photography, but storytelling: There’s something brewing, brooding there.

These same feelings are present throughout the show, whether the photographs on display were completed in 1977 or 2011, two years before Turbeville died. A shot from her first “Women in the Woods” series for Italian Vogue in 1977 features a woman in a forest wearing a lightly colored pleated dress in perfect contrast to the background, staring into the greenery’s oblivion, softly clasping her hands together while other women stand behind, none interacting with the other. In a color series for Vogue from 1984, even in clothes of ravishingly bright emeralds, fuchsias, and mustards, the women have secrets, something keeping them at a distance. In these images, as in all of her work, Turbeville pulls the characters from the inside out so the body is not just a hanger, as it had been in fashion photography for so long (and, arguably, still is today). Looking at Turbeville’s women, it’s clear that their attire and appearance is secondary. The power of the images is that they evoke the desire to understand what’s happening in the subjects’ minds.

The Work of a Fashion Photographer Who Despised the Fashion World. By Elyssa Goodman. Hyperallergic , May 25, 2017

How is it that a photograph of two women wearing two plain white frocks, standing in a winter wood and barely visible amid clouds of ghostly smoke, could serve as such a profound inspiration, a clarion call to the disaffected foot soldiers of the fashion army? “In my pictures, you never know, that’s the mystery. It’s just a suggestion and you leave it to the audience to put what they want on it. It’s fashion in disguise,” the late photographer Deborah Turbeville, creator of this disturbing image, once said.

This picture, and many others from Turbeville’s Comme des Garçons and Women in the Woods photo shoots, are on display through June 10 at the Staley-Wise Gallery in Soho, timed to align the Met’s current Comme retrospective. “I have an instinct for finding the odd location, the dismissed face, the eerie atmosphere, the oppressed mood,” Turbeville explained, and this talent is everywhere stunningly apparent. In one photo, putative children of the damned sport straw boaters; in another, a veiled wraith descends a sepulchral staircase in a Galerie Vivienne passage.

When these images were first published, they represented a radical break in the world of fashion photography, which at the time was pretty much stuck in two trenches: an obsession with sexiness verging on the semi-pornographic, and a sunny inane cheerfulness. Turbeville chose a third path—a haunting hyper-realism, a notion of fashion photography that relied on the mere suggestion of clothing.

Born in 1932, Turbeville was raised in a wealthy, eccentric household in Massachusetts. She came to New York at 20, worked as a house model and general assistant to the iconic American designer Claire McCardell, whom she described as “kind of the Coco Chanel of the State of New York.” Turbeville eventually became an editor at Harper’s Bazaar but it didn’t stick; by the 1970s she was exploring her distinctive vision with her own pictures.

Her life was as distinctive as her art. Etheleen Staley, one of the founders of the gallery that has represented Turbeville’s work for decades, describes her as quiet and intellectual, a reader of obscure books and a seeker of avant-garde films, someone who “didn’t suffer fools.” Her apartment at the Ansonia on the Upper West Side featured one big room that transported you back in time. “You thought you were in Russia planning the Revolution—it looked like a salon in Moscow at the turn of the century,” Staley recalls.

But if that room was perfect, Turbeville’s art was emphatically, deliberately not. “A lot of times there were big mistakes,” she once said, “. . . there would be a strange cropping or one girl in focus and three out or a blur. But I would end up liking the mistakes and incorporating them into my work. And I became known for it.”

Known for it, and beloved for it.

Celebrating the Haunted Beauty of Deborah Turbeville and Comme des Garçons. By Lynn Yaeger.  Vogue. May 12 , 2017.

I first met Deborah about 30 years ago when I was working at Lei magazine. It was a very successful youth-oriented title. I was trying to do a different take on fashion and style using younger photographers such as Paolo Roversi, Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel and Mario Testino, all of whom I later brought to Vogue with me. I saw these pictures she did of girls in an old school house and in a dancing school. Just so atmospheric and beautiful.

I loved Deborah's work because it was original yet recognisable. She had a style, a signature. I wanted her in the mix because she was so individual and her style was timeless, even though it was black and white. She was all about atmosphere. Even when the backdrops were not beautiful, which was often the case, she transformed them and made the decay of old buildings seem dream-like. Sometimes an art director would say that her shots were out of focus, but that was her way of making the world seem otherworldly.

Deborah never really had the recognition or the success she deserved. She knew Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton, but she did not get their recognition. People in the fashion world like more commercial photographers and she never cared to become commercial. Plus, she had to like what she was doing for the passion to be there. If she ended up on a shoot she didn't like, I have to say, you heard about it. It was, "I don't like this place. I don't like this model." She would complain for hours.

Deborah was utterly individual, both in her work and her life. She was stylish, not fashionable: tall, slim, elegant. She wore simple things – dark pants, a T-shirt. There was a little bit of the hippy about her, too. She had a beautiful house on New York's Upper West Side and another in Mexico, and they were shabby-beautiful. She lived in her own world a little bit and you had to meet her there. She never said too much about what she was going to do when you commissioned her, but it was always her.

People assumed from her name that she was French, but she wasn't. (She was born in Massachusetts.) I didn't know much about her personal life. I know she had relationships and that she never married, but she was very private. Very few people knew about her life, and that is how she wanted it. She was friendly, but in a very selective way. Everyone who worked with her loved her because she was so sweet and so passionate.

Deborah was quite independent and liked to be a little mysterious. She loved Russia, the old Russia, and spent a lot of time in St Petersburg. I think, though I may be wrong, that she was a former model, but she was not of the trendy world of fashion. In fact, she was the opposite. She did not follow; she did her own thing. She never called herself an artist and when others did, she would say: "I'm a photographer."

For me, though, she was an artist. She led a kind of revolution in fashion photography with her early work, with the atmosphere and locations, but she was not a fashion photographer. The term is too confining for what she did. She made these beautiful books about places and buildings, like her Versailles book (Unseen Versailles), but I do think her fashion photographs worked against her in the art world. She was always somehow in the middle – between the worlds of art and fashion. She never really fitted into either.

It was great that Valentino used her in his campaigns until about two years ago. I was so glad about that. And a few days before she died, we agreed to do a book together around her pictures of the great aristocratic Italian families. It is a beautiful and sad thing to be doing now that she is not here, but I am very happy and proud to be doing it. For me, she is among the greatest photographers. She could have done so much more, but she was not prepared to compromise. That is the way of the true artist.

Deborah Turbeville remembered by Franca Sozzani. The Guardian ,  December 15, 2013.

  Deborah Turbeville : her work in pictures. The Guardian,  October 31 , 2013.