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Photographs by Deborah Turbeville
Thames & Hudson, London, United Kingdom, 2023. 240 pp..
Many years ago, I fell in thrall to Deborah Turbeville’s photography. Turbeville’s world was female centric and female authored. Her dreamlike images were infused with a feminine interiority like nothing I’d seen: a solid counterpoint to the widespread circulation of the male gaze and objectification of women.
Published in conjunction with a major traveling exhibition beginning at Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is a comprehensive journey into the work of Deborah Turbeville. Although she is renowned primarily for the genre of fashion photography, her entire body of work is that of an innovative and experimental artist.
By focusing on Turbeville’s use of collage throughout her practice, Photo Elysée Director Nathalie Herschdorfer not only brings unknown images to light, but also proposes that the genius of Turbeville’s work can be found in her collages. Drawing from the MUUS Collection’s archive of Turbeville’s estate and working with Richard Grosgard, advisor to MUUS Collection, Herschdorfer has produced a retrospective in book form, "situating Turbeville in the pantheon of 20th century photographic artists" and revealing the process of her singular practice.
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From her breakout 1975 Vogue magazine succès de scandale, ‘Bathhouse,’ to individual women waiting in the woods (for what, for whom?), to the uninhabited palace of Versailles, Turbeville’s work implies a fictive narrative. Along with the human characters she introduces, her collages and photographs evoke the personification of location. A Turbeville mise en scène is unmistakably hers — atmosphere is everything, mood is all.
Mining her own archive, reusing images, and defacing photographs to create a sense of the timeworn and timeless, Turbeville removed her photographs from the here and now, placing her subjects in suspension in a liminal world. Her models are as singular as her photos: often women with unconventional faces, a sense of life lived — self-contained and inwardly focused. When one regards the reigning fashion photography trends of the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, Turbeville’s unique imagery is iconoclastic in the extreme.
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Lavishly produced and sumptuously printed, at 240 pages, this is a big, beautiful book. The images blur the line between photographic reproductions and actual 3-D replications of Turbeville’s collages, complete with dressmaker’s pins, attendant shadows, yellowed tape, and brown paper backing. To turn the pages is to travel through her work with no distractions. Much care has been taken to reflect Turbeville’s aesthetic. The book’s design is elegant in every respect and fully illustrates both her photographic interests and the connections between personal work and paid assignments.
Bringing Turbeville’s body of work to a wider audience, Nathalie Herschdorfer has produced an expansive reappraisal of a brilliantly unique and generative artist. Photocollage is both a generous, deeply researched visual profile (and itself a work of artistry), but also, and principally, a tribute to an artist who followed her own true muse.
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