This weekend, fashion lost photographer Deborah Turbeville, a true treasure + practically, a self-taught genius. Known for her moody + often dark photos, with clothes approached as victims of circumstance, she turned fashion photography on it’s head. Known for her incendiary ‘Bathhouse Series’ (photos 2 + 4 above), she found beauty + interest in the strangest of places. Often times, decrepit locations took center stage, with models used as props, dressed in high fashion. Negatives were given several lives, by being scratched, torn + scattered with dust, to give them the right amount of decay. A lot of the times, she used faded color, black + white + sepia tones, while sometimes, overexposing her prints, to give her photos that hauntingly eerie look.
In 1977, Turbeville told The Times, ‘I can’t deny that I design the background. A woman in my pictures doesn’t just sit there. In what kind of mood would a woman be, wearing whatever? I go into a woman’s private world, where you never go.’ Fortunately for us, Deborah made it easy for us to travel there too, no matter how melancholic.
RIP Deborah.