From photograph to photocollage, Deborah Turbeville (1932-2013) has created a melancholy, timeless universe that belongs to her alone. “I enter the private world of women, where one never goes,” the American photographer once declared. The Musée de Photographie de Lausanne is devoting a retrospective to the woman who gave fashion photography a soul.
It was as a stylist for Harpers Bazar and various other fashion magazines that the former model made her first forays into the New York scene, before deciding in 1966 to take photographs herself and train in technique with Richard Avedon, who would make her his protégé. Essentially self-taught, Deborah Turbeville belonged to no particular school of photography, and her highly distinctive work, in terms of both atmosphere and plasticity, remains unclassifiable. Featuring indolent women isolated in seemingly abandoned places, locked away in their solitude, their eyes lost in thought – women with elusive, melancholy gazes, seeming to want to escape or disappear – she stands in stark contrast to the fashion pages of the time, all the more so as her shots do not highlight the clothes they are supposed to magnify…
©Deborah Turbeville
In addition to the foggy, often twilight atmosphere, the blurring effects and the work on prints (grain, sepia tones, play on contrasts, scratches on negatives…) attest to an almost “pictorialist” research into photographic material itself – material that Deborah Turbeville applied herself to artificially damaging so that the image “never seems [to be] completely there”, that it seems to be an apparition…
It’s an experiment in “disintegration” that we see at work in the photocollages she produced alongside her fashion photos from the 1970s onwards. Photocopying, cutting, scratching and pinning or taping truncated, torn prints onto kraft paper, writing words or phrases in the margins… she creates “narrative sequences”. This cinematic quality is also evident in her fashion photographs, which often give the impression of freeze-frames.
Women as Apparitions
These include three particularly striking series. The first, produced in 1975 for American Vogue, caused a veritable scandal that was to establish the artist’s reputation: in The Bathhouse, the bikini-clad models photographed in New York bathhouses exude such a strange atmosphere that the photographer was accused of morbidity and immorality, and some American states went so far as to ban sales of the magazine. A champion of “porno chic”, Alexander Liberman 1 saw in this lascivious, prison-like choreography the “most revolutionary images of the moment”.
Another choreography that seems frozen in time – or rather, out of time – is less subversive but just as evocative: the one composed between 1979 and 1981 in the Château de Versailles, where Déborah Turbeville doesn’t hesitate to introduce dead leaves and cobwebs around the mannequins to create the impression of a place haunted by ghosts.
©Deborah Turbeville
Ghostly, too, are these plaster-covered women photographed in 1977 at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, where one might be tempted to see an allegory of disappearance or appearance, burial or rebirth – nothing is ever unequivocal with Turbeville.
- American press publisher who worked for Condé Nast for thirty years
“Deborah Turbeville – Photocollage
Until February 25
PhotoElysées
Place de la Gare 17
Lausanne