The Anti-Fashion Fashion Photographs of Deborah Turbeville

It has been ten years since Deborah Turbeville’s passing. The fashion photographer and artist was known for her dreamy, mysterious photographs. During her career, Turbeville worked with fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Mademoiselle. 

Image: Deborah Turbeville via The New Yorker

Despite her success within the fashion industry, Turbeville thought of her work as outside of fashion, and of herself as something of an outcast. She was not interested in the glossy, sexual imagery that her contemporaries were printing in the same publications; instead, she was interested in creating ghostlike images that exist outside of time. 

Image: Deborah Turbeville via The New Yorker

Just as she wasn’t interested in creating work with polished content, neither was she particularly keen on the prints themselves being polished. She regularly tore, distorted, or otherwise altered her photographs to further emphasize their mysterious quality. She liked blurry photos, photos with flare, and any other accidents that happened during the creative process. 

Image: Deborah Turbeville via The New Yorker

Turbeville liked to shoot her models in locations that showed the destruction of grandeur: an old bath house, an overgrown garden, old and decrepit mansions. She shot in the Newport mansions, at Versailles, and in St. Petersburg, Russia, the latter of which she received a Fulbright for, capturing “moments of history”. 

Although she was a fashion photographer, Turbeville’s work is about anything but fashion. Her photographs are about life. They bring out the characters of her models, emphasizing vulnerability, femininity, and intimacy. 

Image: Deborah Turbeville via The Paris Review