Deborah Turbeville’s women linger. They lurk awkwardly at the corner of the frame, averting their gaze. They collapse on stairs and sink into the mud, are left adrift in abandoned castles, dilapidated bathhouses and barren forests. They are cut in half, blurred, scratched and scarred. And yet for all the women’s apparent fragility, these images revolutionized fashion photography. A new exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery aims to show how Turbeville was one of fashion’s most important image makers. Featuring both her editorial work and lesser-known collage experiments, Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage offers fresh insight into the photographer’s world, exploring how she crafted an alternative vision of womanhood defined by a sense of unease and ambiguity.
Born in Boston in 1932, Turbeville originally began her career as an assistant and model for fashion designer Claire McCardell, an experience which would no doubt go on to inform her approach to being on the other side of the camera. An introduction to legendary editor Diana Vreeland led to her joining Harper’s Bazaar as an editor. However, she soon found herself bored at the magazine, and, after being fired in 1965, took a photography workshop with Richard Avedon and art director Marvin Israel in 1966. With both figures encouraging her unique style, Turbeville committed to her own photographic career. Rising to prominence in the 1970s, she would shoot for Vogue, Vogue Italia, and Nova, alongside working for brands including Comme des Garçons and Calvin Klein. Despite this, she remained firm in her belief that she was “not really a fashion photographer.”
Her work could not have been further from the main styles at the time, which fluctuated between the glossy hyper-sexuality exemplified by Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, and what fashion journalist Lynn Yaeger calls a “sunny inane cheerfulness”. Rejecting this suffocating binary, Turbeville chose to “go into a woman’s private world”. Placing groups of models – often in pairs, yet never seeming to interact with each other – in eerie environments, Turbeville evidently saw this ‘private world’ as a mystic and mysterious place. Her ambiguous narratives often shocked viewers, with critics accusing her 1975 Bath House series – which featured a collection of gaunt-looking models placed in a decaying bath house – of promoting drug use and lesbian relationships, while the bleak setting was even considered a potential allusion to concentration camps. While Turbeville’s work is routinely described as ‘romantic’ or ‘melancholic’ – which it often is – there is also often an undercurrent of violence. Collapsed figures are hinted at being victims of unknown violations, others appear as if they have just escaped danger. “In my pictures, you never know, that’s the mystery,” Turbeville explained.
Turbeville showed that there could be power in the ambiguous body, for it demands a response. The anxiety-inducing poses of her models, who wring their hands, or anxiously hold themselves, are not just visually processed by the viewer, but experienced on an almost physical level. Their discomfort begins to become our own. Indeed, one critic from 1977 warned that Turbeville’s models “often disturb viewers”. Through their failure to conform, these awkward bodies resist the visual consumption that haunts the typical fashion model, escaping from the confines of the photograph to linger in the viewer’s mind.
This focus on capturing what Turbeville termed ‘the dismissed face’ radically disrupted the traditional economies of desire associated with fashion photography. Rather than what Conde Nast’s Alexander Liberman described in 1979 as the “civilizing power of fashion” to create beautiful and desirable images, the models’ uneasy poses create a jarring disconnect between their fashionable clothes – which often fall off their strikingly thin frames – and clear discomfort. Any real detail in the clothes is often almost impossible to see, obscured by Turbeville’s grainy and out of focus style. In one striking 1980 work for Comme des Garçons, a ghostly figure walks down a staircase; her face obscured behind a veil, she appears almost as an apparition, closer to the spectre of death than a fashion model. Neither body nor lifestyle are to be craved – buying these clothes will not bring you joy, a new life, or a husband.
However, while Turbeville appears to have enjoyed a significant degree of freedom when shooting for fashion magazines, her editors nonetheless required that the clothes were at least somewhat visible. Turbeville’s personal collage work – which makes up the crux of Photocollage – allowed her to enter even more experimental territory. Turbeville would often produce multiple versions of the same picture, ripping the edges, scratching the surface or writing on them to explore different ways of presenting them. She would weave in found objects and text, gluing them on top of the heavy brown paper she used, or stick them through with pins. Embracing imperfection and process, Turbeville sought an expansiveness that could only be fully realised outside of the glossy pages of a magazine.
The medium also allowed Turbeville to further explore the sense of grotesqueness hinted at in her editorial work. The women in the collages are unfixed and uncontrollable, formed of bulging eyes and wild hair. When layered on top of each other, these fragmented features begin to almost merge, making it difficult to distinguish where one body ends and another begins. Unfixed to a singular form, the women reflect a body in a constant act of becoming. In this way, Turbeville’s collage work connects to the long lineage of feminist artists who have been drawn to the medium, using it to explore how womanhood is a medley of often seemingly incompatible parts.
Turbeville showed that there could be beauty and strength in the discarded, the forgotten and the ghostly. In doing so, she pushed fashion photography into new directions, showing how it could go beyond a focus on garments to instead become a “commentary on life.” Decades later, her work remains radical. Images of the abject and grotesque may have become common in fashion photography since the 1990s – helped in no small part by the likes of Corinne Day – but few fashion photographers have attempted to so uncompromisingly step into the female psyche. Looking at her work in the 21 st century, against the current backdrop of polished social media stars and teenagers desperately following 12-step skincare routines, offers a pointed reminder that there is something far more interesting to be found in the margins, hidden behind shadows.
