From photograph to photocollage, Deborah Turbeville (1932-2013) has created a melancholy, timeless universe that belongs to her alone. "I enter the private world of women, where one never goes", the American photographer once declared. The Musée de la Photographie in Lausanne is devoting a retrospective to the woman who gave fashion photography an extra soul.

It was as a stylist for Harper's Bazaar and various other fashion magazines that the former model got her first taste of the New York scene, before deciding, in 1966, to take photographs herself and learn the technique from Richard Avedon, who would make her his protégé. Essentially self-taught, Deborah Turbeville belongs to no particular school, and her highly distinctive work, in terms of both atmosphere and plasticity, remains unclassifiable.

Showing indolent women isolated in seemingly abandoned places, locked away in their solitude, their eyes lost in thought - women with fleeting, melancholy gazes, seeming to want to escape or disappear - she contrasts sharply with the fashion pages of the time, especially as her shots do not enhance the clothes they are supposed to magnify...

In addition to the foggy, often twilight atmosphere, the blurring effects and the work on prints (grain, sepia tones, play on contrasts, scratches on the negatives, etc.) attest to an almost "pictorialist" research on the photographic material itself - material that Deborah Turbeville applied herself to artificially damaging so that the image "never seems [to be] completely there", that it seems to be an apparition...

Her experimentation with "disintegration" can be seen at work in the photocollages she produced alongside her fashion photos from the 1970s onwards. Photocopying, cutting, scratching and pinning or taping truncated, torn prints onto kraft paper, writing words or phrases in the margins... she creates "narrative sequences". This cinematic quality is also evident in her fashion photographs, which often give the impression of freeze-frames.

WOMEN WHO LOOK LIKE APPARITIONS

These include three particularly striking series. The first, produced in 1975 for American Vogue, caused a veritable scandal that was to establish the artist's reputation: in The Bathhouse, depicting bikini-clad models photographed in New York bathhouses, the atmosphere is so strange that the photographer was accused of morbidity and immorality, and some American states went so far as to ban sales of the magazine. A champion of "porno chic", Alexander Liberman 1 saw in this lascivious, prison-like choreography the "most revolutionary images of the moment".

Another choreography that seems frozen in time - or rather, out of time - is less subversive but just as evocative: the one composed between 1979 and 1981 in the Château de Versailles, where Deborah Turbeville doesn't hesitate to introduce dead leaves and cobwebs around the mannequins to create the impression of a place haunted by ghosts.

Also ghostly are the plaster-covered women photographed in 1977 at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, images in which we might be tempted to see an allegory of disappearance or appearance, burial or rebirth - nothing is ever unequivocal in Turbeville's work.
1 American newspaper publisher who worked for thirty years
at Condé Nast.

"DEBORAH TURBEVILLE - PHOTOCOLLAGE" PHOTO ÉLYSÉE
PLACE DE LA GARE 17, LAUSANNE (SWITZERLAND)
UNTIL FEBRUARY 25, 2024
ELYSEE.CH