Deborah Turbeville
(1938 - )
Deborah Turbeville was born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1938. Turbeville studied at Brimmer and May School, in Boston, Massachusettsfrom 1949 to 1954. In 1956, she moved to New York at age nineteen, planning a career on the stage. She worked as a model and design assistant to designer Claire McCardell from 1956 to
1958.
From 1960 to 1971 she worked as an editorial assistant at several magazines, including Ladies' Home Journal, Harper's Bazaar, and Mademoiselle. The oddities of her out-of-focus images of slender, slouching women became purposeful by 1966, when she began selling her photographs to Essence (for black women) and Bazaar.
In 1972 she moved to Europe and started her work as a photographer free-lancing for Vogue, Marie-Claire, Nova, and others until 1974. During this period, she produced a series called "Travel through Europe as a Single Woman" that provided the direction for her future fashion work. She gained worldwide attention when she took a series of unsettling fashion photographs in a deserted public bathhouse and published them in Vogue in May 1975. Her work has an eerie and romantic atmosphere, often enhanced by soft-focus shots with mysterious settings. Her women models look mysterious and elusive, as if they were acting out a scene in a play. She has been widely exhibited and published in Esquire, New York, Artforum, and the major fashion magazines.
Deborah Turbeville is known for her compelling and controversial fahion images, many of which, along with personal work, have entered the fine arts market and been exhitibed internationally. Turbeville became one of a small group of image-makers who profoundly changed the aesthetics of fashion photography in the 1970s. Her choices of a 35-mm camera and frequent use of natural lighting were also a departure from the rules in place at that time. Turbeville sometimes presented scratched, taped-over and ripped prints as finished work. Her initial efforts were in color, because she lacked darkroom skills, although she has subsequently worked in both black and white and color. The color palette she chooses is typically soft and fairly monotone, resembling gentle hand coloring. Her black and white prints are toned or hand colored at times. When using Polaroid film, she may leave the prints to discolor; another way to achieve her offbeat look.
In addition to advertising and editorial fashion work, Turbeville has published a number of books like: Maquillage (1975), Wallflower (1978), Unseen Versailles (1981), and Newport Remembered. She had a major solo show at the Georges Pompidou Center in 1986, and her photographs have been shown frequently in galleries in New York as well as in cities around the world, including, Paris, Tokyo, Milan, and Mexico City. In the 1980s, Turbeville bought a house in Mexico, and started a series of work in Mexico and Guatemala that was exhibited in 1991-1992 in the United States and in Europe. Over recent years she has been attracted by Russia and has photographed a number of Russian palaces. In 2003, Turbeville taught photography in St. Petersburg through a Fulbright scholarship. Deborah Turbeville presently lives in New York and continues to pursue personal and commercial photographic projects.
