It's Turbeville Time!

Deborah Turbeville is one of my favorite fashion photographers. I wrote a lengthy paper about her Unseen Versailles series (non-fashion photographs, although some were published in Vogue) for my favorite seminar - Fashion in Modern Paris. She represents the return to Surrealism in the 1970s. Her contemporaries were photographers like Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, both males whose photographs can be disgusting, aggressive, violent, and hyper-sexual. She is so very different from her contemporaries and from any other photographer. Her images are haunting, messy, frozen, quiet and beautiful.

These are some of my favorite images, of which there are several, from Unseen Versailles.

She is most (in)famous for her bathhouse series, which she took for Vogue. These photographs were some of the first to show women as obviously uninviting, perhaps threatening, drugged, and reminded many of gas chambers.

She often depicts only females and especially reclining and in interior spaces. I have noticed many of her photographs include several females in large rooms with tall ceilings. This is a photograph of her work for Valentino F/W 2012.

Aaaand Turbeville at work.

Art history truly is my only passion. I love that I have taken so many classes that cover so many different periods and topics. I know it is nerdy, but it drives my soul.