Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage

Timeless, evocative and hauntingly beautiful: a retrospective monograph by a truly innovative image maker whose female gaze transformed fashion photography.

American photographer Deborah Turbeville defies classification. She belongs to no school or movement. Her unique visual signature has been recognizable since her emergence as a major talent in the 1970s. Her images are evocative, difficult to date at first glance, and seem dreamlike to our 21st-century eyes. Turbeville stands apart from her male contemporaries, whose hard-edged, highly sexualized photographs of women now seem to be of their time in comparison with Turbeville’s very different representation of beauty.

This book focuses on the area of Turbeville’s practice where her genius as an artist can be found: photocollage. In contrast to her contemporaries in fashion photography, she was deliberately playful with her images: xeroxing, cutting, scraping and pinning prints together, writing in the margins and creating narrative sequences. Her work is located far from single, glossy images. It inhabits a liminal zone between art and commerce.

Built upon extensive research in the Deborah Turbeville archive, the work shown spans commercial and personal projects, with many images published for the first time. With texts by Vince Aletti, Anna Tellgren and Felix Hoffmann, this book brings into the spotlight the ways in which Turbeville redefined fashion photography, moving away from the sexual provocation and stereotypes assigned by male photographers to an idea of femininity on her terms. Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage will be an essential publication with modern relevance for all with a passion for fashion photography.

About the Author:

Nathalie Herschdorfer is Director of Photo Elysee-Museum of Photography in Lausanne. Her previous books include Coming into Fashion, Afterwards: Contemporary Photography Confronting the Past and Body: The Photography Book. Deborah Turbeville (1934–2013) was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her fashion photography featured in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Nova and The New York Times and for fashion labels including Commes des Garcons, Guy Laroche and Charles Jordan. Her archive is held by The MUUS Collection.