Deborah Turbeville

The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is photography. Work by Deborah Turbeville is recorded in the collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, J. Paul Getty Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art. Distinctions recorded are Lucie Award.

• Name — Deborah Turbeville • Birth Name — Deborah Lou Turbeville • Born — 6 July 1932 • Birthplace — Stoneham, Massachusetts • Died — 24 October 2013 • Place of death — New York, New York • Field — Photography

She was born in 1932 in Stoneham, Massachusetts, into a wealthy family in New England that desired to be both distinguished and isolated, but paradoxically suffered from this isolation. Deborah's mother and aunts inherited a large house from her paternal grandfather, isolated in the periphery of Boston. Deborah's father, who was from Texas, also lived in the house. This familial community, which cultivated its members' intellectual superiority through frequent trips to Boston's opera and cinemas, also suffered from this exile in the suburbs. Deborah had an older brother called Tom, who lived in New York on Riverside Drive at the same time Deborah was living there. She was a student at Brimmer and May School in the Bay of Boston, and has always cited as her first sources of inspiration the narrow cobble streets, Louisburg Square, snow and tinted windows. In addition to her family home on the outskirts of Boston, Turbeville also spent her summers in their vacation home in Ogunquit in Maine.

During the 1970s, fashion photography moved more towards sexual provocation and tended to become, according to Nancy Hall-Duncan, "a subdivision of the culture of pornography." Turbeville took its misty atmospheres and combined them with models that communicated neither between one another nor with the viewer. Nancy Hall-Duncan notes that these women seemed "locked in their solitude," an impression reinforced "by lazy, soft poses." And, she added: "In the broadest sense, Turbeville's photographs reflected the psychological collapse of the modern world, but people with whom Turbeville recognized her failure to communicate perfectly. She was even scared of them, as she could not have the smallest preconceived idea of them. "I am often scared, of people. This is found in the photos I take: almost the feeling of humiliation or embarrassment. The young women lower their eyes, or look elsewhere, they cannot look the lens in the face. And I, I cannot force them to look directly in the lens, or make a face like everything is great and it's truly cool!" Indeed, in the collective book Women on Women, about women photographing other women, she wrote that in her photos, "there is the gnawing feeling that something is wrong. My work is not complete if it does not contain some vestige of this frustration in the final prints." Thus, in her work in fashion photography, she tried to avoid a "stereotypical ideal" and glamour: "It wasn't the perfectly beautiful girl who made me want to take photos, but the girl with an intrigue in her face, with a profoundness below the surface." Accordingly, the models themselves take precedence over the "innocuous, -hued separates of the seventies and eighties," despite their averted gazes.

Turbeville died from lung cancer at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan on October 24, 2013, at the age of 81.

• Wallflower. Congreve, 1979. • Unseen Versailles. Doubleday, 1981. Introduction by Louis Auchincloss. • Les Amoureuses du Temps Pass. Parco, 1985. • Photographers Contemporains I. Centre Georges Pompidou/M.N.A.M., 1986. • Newport Remembered. Harry Abrams, 1994. Introduction by Louis Auchincloss. • The Voyage of the Virgen Maria Candelaria. Parco, 1996. • Studio St. Petersburg. Bulfinch, 1997. • Past Imperfect. Steidl, Germany 2010.. • Casa No. Name. Rizzoli, 2009. • Comme des Garçons 1981. 2017

• Yearbook of Photography. Time-Life, 1976. • Women By Women. Aurum, 1978. • Alexander Liberman The World of American Vogue: Fifty Years of Fashion. • Hall-Duncan, Nancy. The History of Fashion Photography. • The Idealizing Vision. Aperture, 1990. • Wedding Days, Images of Matrimony. H2O/Graystone, Tokyo, 1996.