About the artist

On arrival in New York in 1957, at the age of 19, she assisted and modelled for the fashion designer Claire McCardell. She met Diana Vreeland, the famed editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and was offered a job as editor at the magazine in 1963. Her introduction to photography was through photographers Hiro, Bob Richardson, Diane Arbus and especially Richard Avedon, who was forcefully struck by her out-of-focus images.

She soon started to take fashion photographs herself, working as both art director and photographer. Her first publications were with Zoom, Nova and Depeche Mode in Paris. While working for the magazines Mademoiselle and Ladies’ Home Journal, her vision as editor caught Alexander Liberman’s attention. In 1975, Conde Nast’s influential artistic director commissioned her to shoot several fashion editorials for Vogue.

Deborah Turbeville was one of the leading fashion photographers of the 1970s and the 1980s. Working between New York:, Mexico, Paris and St. Petersburg (where she taught photography), Turbeville published several photographic books. Gradually, she began to exhibit her personal work, forging a successful career beyond the field of fashion industry. Her photographs were shown at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and in Mexico City. They are now part of various collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York:, as well as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston.

I try to make the soft focus and the grains and the texture work in a kind of perverse, stronge, eerie way, not in a romantic way./Deborah Turbeville