Photography of a woman in a veil descending a stair — Deborah Turbeville, Comme des Garçons, Escalier dans Passage Vivienne, from the series ”Comme des Garçons”, Paris, France, November , 1980 Courtesy of MUUS Collection. © Deborah Turbeville/MUUS Collection

Deborah Turbeville

Photocollage

2.5 – 27.9 2026

Malmö

Opens in 17 days

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The American photographer Deborah Turbeville (1932 – 2013) challenged and reshaped both fashion photography and the ways of working with the photographic image in an artistic context. She belonged to no particular school or movement, yet from the 1970s onwards developed a deeply personal visual language – characterised by a distinctive aesthetic in which timelessness, melancholy, and a sense of patina permeate her photographs.

Moderna Museet Malmö presents two parallel exhibitions: “Deborah Turbeville – Photocollage” and “Ikram Abdulkadir – Soft Focus”. Installed side by side on Level 2, the exhibitions each take fashion and portrait photography as their point of departure. In both artists’ practices, people are at the centre – in images marked by presence, atmosphere, and a sense of timelessness.

In the encounter between Deborah Turbeville and Ikram Abdulkadir, both similarities and differences emerge. While Turbeville worked with staged environments and a deliberate aesthetic, Abdulkadir departs from the intimate and the everyday. At the same time, a shared sensibility becomes visible – a gaze that lingers, a resistance to fixed meanings, and a desire to make space for what otherwise remains unspoken. Both artists’ practices can be related to pictorialism, an early movement in art photography in which images are often softly focused and approach the painterly. In Turbeville’s work, this is evident in her manipulated photographs and photocollages; in Abdulkadir’s, in her way of working with colour, form, and light and shadow.

After a period as a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar and commissions for publications such as Vogue, she moved away from the commercial logic of fashion photography. Instead, she used fashion as one element within a broader artistic practice, where the images carried narratives, atmospheres, and psychological states. In her photographs, women appear in evocative environments – abandoned interiors, corridors, bathhouses, and greenhouses. The images are often blurred, overexposed, or deliberately manipulated: scratched, toned, or fragmented. Through this treatment, the boundary between photography and other image forms dissolves.

Turbeville travelled and worked between New York, Mexico, Paris, and Saint Petersburg. The exhibition “Photocollage” traces her artistic exploration over four decades – from fashion photography to more personal and experimental works. It presents an extensive selection of her handmade collages, where the photograph becomes part of a larger whole. Images are cut, torn, pinned, layered, and combined with other materials in compositions that approach painting or storyboard-like sequences. By foregrounding her work with material and process, the exhibition highlights a frequently overlooked aspect of Turbeville’s practice and offers a deeper understanding of her significance for the history of photography.