How would you describe her? Did you keep an idea of her in mind throughout the curation process?

Turbeville is primarily known as a fashion photographer - and she was a very successful one. Before she was a photographer, she was a fashion editor, and before that, she was an assistant and designer’s model. So she brought solid experience and understanding of the different expectations of a brief to her work. She was a master of balancing all those interlocking expectations in a way that still allowed her to create fashion photography exactly as she wished it to look and feel. Working with stylists, models, editors, and ateliers seemed to come very naturally to her. She was uncompromising and prepared to push back in defence of her vision, particularly in a male-dominated industry in the 1970s. Before working on the exhibition, I knew her only as a fashion photographer - I have learnt so much about her personal projects and commissions from outside the world of fashion. Now I see her as a unique creative mind, an artist who worked with fashion but who also built her own creative universe - making photographic series, creative writing, and collages that were inspired by her travels and love of literature and film.

How did you approach curating the exhibition? Which pieces did you choose not to display from the MUUS Collection? And which curation choices are you particularly proud of?

Nathalie Herschdorfer spent a great deal of time in Turbeville’s archives. It was her discovery of the Passport series that led us to focus on Turbeville’s unique application of collage in her work. The exhibition has made connections across the series. I particularly appreciate that both Maquillage (1975) and Passport (early 1990s) are given special position and prominence. Both series, one coming early in her career and one coming decades later, use creative writing and satire and send up the industry. They highlight Turbeville’s irreverence and her sense of humour - something the fashion industry is not often known for.

Before her death, Turbeville said to the exhibit’s co-curator, Natalie Herschdorfer, that she hoped she would be remembered for more than her most famous and enduring work, the Bathhouse sequence. How do you think her work changed over the course of her 40-year career? Compared to where she started, where did she end up?

In many ways Turbeville was very consistent – her interest in creating atmospheric, physiologically charged visuals that seemed out of time drove her from beginning to end. The very first photographs she took with serious intent, before she embarked on her photography career, were in Dubrovnik - a place where the atmosphere is totally led by the stonework and aged architecture. She was always hunting for spaces that had layers of age to them: Parisian palaces, Venetian clock towers, abandoned bathhouses, misty forests, 19th-century mansions, antique glass houses. She sought faded, dusty glamour as a backdrop for her emotionally charged mise en scène. Although she attended a summer masterclass by Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel, she really was mainly self-taught. Her skills as an image-maker grew enormously over time. She was the photographer, but she also had the creative vision to direct all aspects of the shoot - location, casting, props, fashion - as well as her special ability to create series and unique individual collages.

Women are Turbeville’s primary subjects: she has said, “I go into a woman’s private world, where you never go.” Do you think the ‘female gaze’ is a useful lens to explore her work? Or, more broadly, how significant do you think the idea of the self - and the more psychoanalytical idea of the fractured self - is to her work?

Interiority is very present in Turbeville’s work. Her subjects often appear lost in their own worlds, searching within for understanding - rather than looking out for connection. I found this unsettling at first - you can read her models as almost disassociated. But I came to read it as a defiant rejection of what’s expected of the model - to perform and connect to the viewers. A lot of fashion photography was aggressively sexualised – think Avedon, Newton, Bourdin, amongst others. The aesthetic was high gloss and heavy lacquer, and Turbeville’s own very soft, mysterious version of femininity is in stark contrast.

Turbeville’s work often involves an intimate act of collage, finished with masking tape, drawing pins, and annotations. The spontaneous imperfection and physicality of these different textural elements feel particularly joyful to look at. I wonder if you think the analogue materiality of her work will have increasing poignancy in the digital age?

We have all types of prints in the exhibition - Polaroids, even electrostatic prints – which are essentially photocopies. Turbeville was not a print fetishist in any way; the types of prints vary, as did her way of handling them: cutting, pinning, taping. All acts that are in some way irreverent and disobedient. I agree - they are joyful to look at. Seeing the works in person and sensing her hand in creating them does have a particular magic to it.

Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is organised by The Photographers’ Gallery, produced by Photo Elysee in collaboration with MUUS collection. The exhibition is curated by Nathalie Herschdorfer, Director of Photo Elysée, and Karen McQuaid, Senior Curator at The Photographers’ Gallery.

09 Oct 2024 - 23 Feb 2025