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.

From internationally acclaimed photographer Deborah Turbeville comes the first book on her highly influential visionary avant-garde fashion photography. Celebrated for her poetic grace and cinematic vision, Deborah Turbeville has produced fashion tableaux that draw the viewer into her otherworldly environments. A romantic and modernist, Turbeville bridges the boundaries between commercial fashion and fine arts photography. In this remarkable presentation, Turbeville reveals her highly individualistic point of view of fashion photography and the stories behind her photographs.

This first retrospective presentation of Turbeville's fashion photography was selected by the artist herself. In addition, she has designed the evocative layouts to create yet another masterwork. The presentation includes Turbeville's most famous photographs, among them the controversial Bathhouse series of 1975 for American Vogue with disturbingly isolated figures and her Woman in the Woods series of 1977 for Italian Vogue showing psychologically charged emotions, along with her numerous photography campaigns for labels like Sonia Rykiel, Valentino, Yamamoto, Ungaro, and Commes des Garçons, as well as commissions for Chanel and work that has never been seen before. Her most current project for Casa Vogue--Italian nobility dressed in special couture outfits--evokes Turbeville's vision of everlasting beauty.

About the Author

Deborah Turbeville, a fashion editor turned photographer, was a fashion editor for Mademoiselle in 1966. A portfolio of some very stylized photographs she did for Saks Fifth Avenue was her first big breakthrough into the fashion photography world. Subsequently, her work first appeared in Vogue in the 1970s. Since then she has been a dominant figure in contemporary photography. Turbeville has authored many books, including Unseen Versailles, Wallflower, Studio St. Petersburg, Past Imperfect 1978-1997, and Casa No Name. Her work continues to be exhibited around the world and is published regularly in many international magazines.