Deborah Turbeville

(American, 1938–2013)

Deborah Lou Turbeville was an American photographer most known for her role in shifting the style of fashion photography from its traditional, well-lit images to a brooding, dreamy style. Unlike her contemporaries Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, whose styles were also edgy and dark but leaned more towards urban, erotic tones, Turbeville’s aesthetic tended towards a dreamy and mysterious style, contradicting the ideas of technical perfection and the sexualization of the female figure. “The idea of disintegration is really at the heart of my work,” she said about her photography, which has been characterized by its grain, its use of pastel, sepia, or black and white tones, and by its image blurring techniques. Turbeville was born on July 6, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. Growing up she was very involved in theater, dance, and literature. She moved to New York after school initially intending to pursue a career in theater, however she was discovered by fashion designer Claire McCardell and was asked to join her design studio. Through her work, Turbeville later met Diana Vreeland, editor of Harper’s Bazaar at the time, and became editor at the magazine where she worked with photographers like Richard Avedon, Bob Richardson, and Diane Arbus and started to develop her own style. Over the years, her work was published in numerous publications such as VOGUE, The New York Times, W, and The London Sunday Times. One of her most famous images, Bath House, was taken in 1975 for a swimsuit photoshoot for VOGUE. Showing five listless women leaning against the shower room walls of a condemned New York bathhouse, the photograph was included in an exhibition in Hofstra University later that year. Turbeville also published several books of her photographs including Les Amoureuses Du Temps Passé, Nostalgia, Casa No Name, and The Fashion Pictures. Dividing her time between residences in New York, San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, and St. Petersburg in Russia, she received a Fulbright grant for her work in Russia as well as a citation from the Russian Cultural Administration for exposing Russian culture and arts to the world. Turbeville passed away from lung cancer on October 24, 2013 in New York. Her work is included today in the permanent collections of many institutions around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston.