Deborah Turbeville came late to photography. It was already the seventies and she was around forty (she was born in 1932), her eyes educated, yes, first as a test model and assistant to Claire McCardell – mother of American sportswear – and then as a fashion editor, an occupation that he despised but would end up awakening his vocation. She thus learned from the best to be the best of all: from Alekséi Brodovich and Alexander Liberman, the art of image composition; with Hiro and Richard Avedon, the handling of the lens.
Elusive personally, not at all accommodating professionally, he was never like the others. Three long decades at the service of the great fashion headlines contemplated her when she died, in 2013. Her Camera at the ready, of course.
“Turbeville redefined fashion photography, moving away from sexual provocation and the stereotypes assigned by male photographers to the idea of ??femininity,” says Efraín Bernal, director of the Madrid gallery, which brings the work of the woman to our country for the first time. artist. There is Bathhouse, the anti-editorial that she photographed for Vogue, the bathroom collections of the moment as an excuse: a group of women photographed in the showers of an old New York bathhouse, the relaxed tension of the dancers and the defiant attitude of the gang members in an atmosphere of neglect as disturbing as the facilities in which they pose.
There were those who wanted to see a gas chamber. And there was something of that: the photographer was talking about the repression to which women (and her body) have always been subjected. Published in May 1975, as it happened, that other scandalous session by Helmut Newton held in Saint Tropez appeared in the same issue, which included the famous image Woman Examining Man. In some North American states it was removed from newsstands.
No, Turbeville’s work was not immune to a certain violence, hidden, but underlined at the same time by the treatment he gave to his images (it has been said: he “violated” them). “They always give the feeling that something is wrong. My work is never complete without that vestige of frustration that results in the final copy,” she explained when presenting her portfolio in the collective book Women on Women (A
Personally, little is known about Deborah Turbeville. That she was from a very well-off family, culturally and intellectually active, although isolated in her domain on the outskirts of Boston. That loneliness of her childhood – prolonged as an adult during her getaways to Saint Petersburg – has been seen in the visual conception of her work, impregnated with an artificial, dreamlike, surreal patina, which seems to place her in another time and place that were not hers. , perhaps in search of lost time.
That “world of blur,” which he claimed to inhabit, was nothing more than an intelligent use of his first technical failures, which he knew how to take advantage of to his advantage. The intentional grain, the manipulation of the negatives and the literal destruction to which he subjected the paper copies (evident in his collages) did the rest. It has also been said: Deborah Turbeville did not document, she hallucinated.
Sometimes, to create you must first destroy. Break, tear, fragment, scratch, mar. A constant in the work – creative expression, if you will – of Deborah Turbeville. “My practice is that of disintegration. After I get the image, I destroy it,” she said. Also that she never considered herself a fashion photographer, photojournalist or portraitist. If anything, artist. Or, sticking only to her work, photographer and that’s it. And yet, her work inevitably developed alongside that disruptive way of understanding the fashion image that prospered in the early 1970s, promoted from Europe by Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton. She, a pro-Bostonian intellectual, gave them a radical response in the United States, dismantling their male gaze on women and her glamorized sexuality with the same avant-garde approach.
That his vision remains relevant – and necessary – is beyond doubt. So much so that, now that ten years have passed since his death (on October 24, 2013, at 81, practically active until the end) and with his legacy safely stored as part of the funds of the MUUS Collection (historical archive of American photography of the 20th century, which acquired it in 2020), it is worth reviewing it.
The Elysée Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, will finally dedicate to him that well-deserved retrospective that was already overdue at the beginning of November. Then a new monograph will also arrive, edited by Thames
