Deborah Turbeville

Vintage Chanel shot at Chanel Apartment, Paris (commissioned by Karl Lagerfeld), 1996

Deborah Turbeville Biography Deborah Turbeville (b. 1932, Boston, MA) arrived in New York at nineteen, drawn toward theater, dance, and literature - interests that would later surface in the staged, narrative quality of her photographs. She was taken on by the designer Claire McCardell as a house model and studio assistant, and through that circle met Diana Vreeland, then editor of Harper's Bazaar, who brought her onto the magazine's staff in 1963. At Bazaar, Turbeville worked alongside Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus, but a 1965 shoot involving Arbus led to litigation and her dismissal. She turned to making her own photographs in the late 1960s, essentially self-taught apart from a six-month workshop she took under Avedon and art director Marvin Israel. Her 1975 swimwear story for American Vogue, shot in a condemned New York bathhouse, established both her reputation and her method at once: models draped listlessly against decaying tile, an image so unlike the polished glamour of the period that it drew accusations ranging from drug references to concentration-camp imagery. She went on to build a body of work defined by soft focus, overexposure, and torn, scratched, or taped prints. Turbeville shot on film and worked extensively in the darkroom and on the studio table afterward, treating the negative and the print as raw material rather than a finished product. She and her longtime collaborator Sharon Schuster frequently distressed finished prints, scratching, tearing, burning, or taping them.