Deborah Turbeville

Perhaps her most famous series, "Bathhouse", was commissioned by Alex Liberman at Vogue. In stark defiance of the traditional fashion photograph of the 1970s, featuring smiling, carefree beauties, Turbeville's models slouched and stretched, looking thin and lifeless. The series proved controversial, but art critics immediately recognized it for its avant-garde nature, and Turbeville continued to bring darkly cinematic inspirations for her fashion pictures.

Deborah Turbeville

After 20 years in New York, Deborah Turbeville decamped to Paris in the late 1970’s in search of new inspiration. Newly emigrated, Turbeville found a setting for her next series: the famed Paris arts school, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. As a complex of 19th century buildings, it provided the perfect backdrop for Turbeville, who was enchanted with the period. Scattered around the interior of the school, Turbeville’s models were powdered in chalky white, transforming into living statues. Like so much of Turbeville’s work, these images were later pinned together into collage, with some images repeating in their negative form.

Deborah Turbeville

During her tenure as an editor at Doubleday, Jacqueline Onassis commissioned Deborah Turbeville to photograph the Palace of Versailles and its labyrinth of hidden chambers and antechambers, culminating in the 1981 book Unseen Versailles. Turbeville spent a winter in Versailles, wandering the areas kept off-limits from tourists and photographing barren rooms, baroque furniture covered with sheets, broken statues, and curtains thick with dust. Unseen Versailles won the American Book Award in Photography in 1982, and firmly established Turbeville as an artist not bound by the constraining world of fashion photography.

Deborah Turbeville

In her first editorial for Vogue Italia in March 1977, Turbeville photographed models in Mantua, Italy, featuring models—distinctly resembling her—standing underneath brambles and trees. The resultant images were later repurposed as collages and prints that she exhibited in New York's MoMA PS1 in 1981 under the title "L’Heure Entre Chien et Loup” (“The Hour Between Dog and Wolf”).

Deborah Turbeville

In 1986, Deborah Turbeville purchased Casa No Name, a storied house in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She was enamored with the house and town, and would go on to create a book dedicated to them both, also titled Casa No Name. Much of the book is focused on iconography, particularly a Virgin of Guadelupe figure she found in a small antiques shop in Guatemala that she later stood at the entrance of her home. Until Casa No Name, religion and spirituality was not a topic often focused on by Turbeville, but some of the old Turbeville remains, with pictures of crumbling frescoes, cracked walls, and empty rooms illuminated only by candlelight.

Deborah Turbeville

Deborah Turbeville’s fascination with Russia began in the early 1990s. The first time she visited St. Petersburg, she wrote about feeling overwhelmed: it seemed the city had been frozen in time, a product of its history and, perhaps more importantly to Turbeville, its literature. Her love of Russia never abated, and she spent a number of years living in St. Petersburg. In 1997, she released Studio St. Petersburg, filled with soft images of the city, speckled photographs of the ballet, and old palaces.