Through photography and photocollage, Deborah Turbeville (1932-2013) created a melancholic and timeless universe entirely her own. "I enter the private world of women where no one ever goes," the American photographer declared. The Lausanne Museum of Photography is dedicating a retrospective to this artist who brought a new dimension to fashion photography.

It was as a stylist for Harper's Bazaar and various other fashion magazines that the former model cut her teeth in the New York scene before deciding, in 1966, to take her own photographs and train in the technique under Richard Avedon, who took her under his wing. Essentially self-taught, Deborah Turbeville belongs to no particular school, and her highly distinctive work, both in terms of atmosphere and style, remains unclassifiable.

By depicting languid women isolated in seemingly abandoned places, locked in their solitude, their eyes lost in thought – women with fleeting and melancholic gazes, seeming to want to escape or disappear – it contrasts considerably with the fashion pages of the time, especially since her photographs do not showcase the clothes they are supposed to magnify…

Besides the hazy and often crepuscular atmosphere, the blurring effects and the work on prints (grain, sepia tones, plays of contrast, scratches on the negatives…) attest to an almost “pictorialist” exploration of the photographic material itself – a material that Deborah Turbeville sought to artificially damage so that the image would “never appear to be completely there,” that it would seem to be an apparition…

An experiment in "disintegration" is evident in the photocollages she created alongside her fashion photography from the 1970s onward. Photocopying, cutting, scratching, and pinning or taping the truncated, torn prints onto kraft paper, writing words or phrases in the margins, she creates "narrative sequences." This highly cinematic quality is also found in her fashion photographs, which often give the impression of being freeze-frames.

WOMEN WHO LOOK LIKE APPEARANCES

Among these, three series stand out. The first, created in 1975 for American Vogue, provoked a veritable scandal that launched the artist's notoriety: in The Bathhouse, depicting bikini-clad models photographed in New York's public baths, such a strange atmosphere emanates from the work that the photographer was accused of morbidity and immorality, with some American states even banning the magazine. Alexander Liberman, a champion of "porno chic," saw in this lascivious and prison-like choreography the "most revolutionary images of the moment."

Another choreography that seems frozen in time – or rather, outside of time – less subversive but just as evocative: the one composed between 1979 and 1981 in the Palace of Versailles where Deborah Turbeville did not hesitate to introduce dead leaves and cobwebs around the mannequins to create an impression of places haunted by ghosts.

Also ghostly are these women covered in plaster photographed in 1977 at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, images in which one would be tempted to see an allegory of disappearance or appearance, of burial or rebirth, nothing ever being without ambiguity in Turbeville.
1 American newspaper publisher who worked for thirty years
during his time at Condé Nast publishing.

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