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.
Despite consistently glowing reviews throughout her career as a photographer, and articles heralding her as a change-maker in fashion (a 1977 article in The New York Times was titled “The Deborah Turbeville Look”), her work, though revered, has slowly slipped away in time. Now, one decade after Turbeville’s death, at 81, in 2013, a new exhibition has just opened at Lausanne’s Photo Elysée. Serving as her first retrospective, “Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage” 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’s embracing what she referred to as the “edge.”
