Deborah Turbeville 1932-2013

One of the great artists who taught me to see the world differently because she saw the world differently. Everything she did was based on an internal cinema, the projectors of which turned at a very interesting Gance-like speed sometimes, or Falconetti-like speed at other times, all the while projecting her brilliant illuminations, most of which centered on the internal lives of the women she photographed in various large or cramped spaces, sometimes looking like birds waiting to be hatched or stuffed–i.e. objectified–but defying those odds through “attitude,” a steady refusal to do all the stereotypical feminine things one sees in most fashion pictures: smiling, stretching, longing to belong. Her fashion pictures were an accident, in any case, and were as much “fine,” art as anything else, and the mystery one finds in her work, her Bronte-foggy worlds where women are shut off or shut down and all the more beautiful because of that, contributed to the sui generis amateur quality in her images, her never getting a picture technically “right,” but entirely correct just the same. She de-commodified fashion by not treating the image as a commodity but something to be stapled, taped, made into something else. And she treated models with a similar freedom and recognition. Her models can be seen but not bought. To have achieved this in fashion is practically never heard of, let alone done. And fashion is a poorer place without her necessary provocations, and her love.