Deborah Turbeville never intended to be a fashion photographer. She was born in Massachusetts, in 1932, and her career came about by a strange, slow osmosis. First, she was a model for the American designer Claire McCardell; next, an editor at Harper’s Bazaar; then, a student of Richard Avedon’s; and finally, a freelance photographer in her own right. Turbeville dreamed of working like Eugène Atget, who spent his time photographing street corners and stairs, leaving behind an archive of exquisitely patinated snaps of Paris. Instead, fashion became her métier. She accepted the work she was assigned, but suffused her images with a decidedly unfashionable vision—spectral, melancholic, and sometimes eerie. Turbeville died in 2013, at 81, and in 2023 her first retrospective, “Photocollage,” opened at Lausanne’s Photo Elysée. Now on view in London, the exhibition focuses on a previously unseen body of work—collages. Torn and taped, overlapping and otherworldly, these images show Turbeville rejecting photography’s ideal of silver-flecked purity. Leaving the collages deliberately distressed, she embraces what she referred to as the “edge.” —Christina Cacouris