A Woman’s Private World
Deborah Turbeville in NYC
Writers have called fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville haunted, avant-garde, a visionary, and painterly. Tenderness and darkness saturated her work in the fashion sector at a time when excess and exaggeration had society hypnotized. In an era of seducing the customer, her work dared to disarm them.
Now, a collection of Turbeville’s rarely-seen collages are about to go on view at Deborah Bell Photographs in New York. The show, “Deborah Turbeville: Collages 1970s-1980s” opens on May 3 and runs through June 29.
When Turbeville passed away a few days before Halloween 2013, The New York Times ran a tribute to her stating she “almost single-handedly turned fashion photography from a clean, well-lighted thing into something dark, brooding and suffused with sensual strangeness.” She achieved her eerie signature aesthetic using a variety of hands-on techniques–deliberately arranging dust on the negatives, fraying and tearing the edges of prints, and marring their surfaces with sharp objects–giving them the kind of redolent age that defies the fashion industry’s aggressive immediacy.
“I can’t deny that I design the background,” Ms. Turbeville told The Times in 1977. “A woman in my pictures doesn’t just sit there. In what kind of mood would a woman be, wearing whatever? I go into a woman’s private world, where you never go.”
Never, until now.
