Deborah Turbeville and Collage: A Love Story Revealed

Before Deborah Turbeville embarked on a prolific photography career, she was a fashion editor at Harper's Bazaar - a position that her life work completely defies by refusing to be confined to a singular school or photography movement. Although critics argue there is an enduring fashion element to her work (and they're not wrong), Turbeville insisted throughout her life, 'I'm not really a fashion photographer', putting to rest any claims that labelled her otherwise.

In a new celebratory exhibition of Turbeville's life and work, Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage, her ties with fashion are once again scrupulously examined as Photo Elysée curator Nathalie Herschdorfer purposefully narrates the idea that Turbeville's photography followed a very distinguished route - ultimately changing the representation of fashion in media as a whole. Coinciding with the publication of a monograph of the same title by Thames & Hudson, both the book and the exhibition reveal a large selection of never-before-seen works, putting an emphasis on the artist's distinctive and textural handmade photo collages, rips, tears and all.

SHOWstudio welcomed Herschdorfer to take part in our In Conversation series earlier this year, where she spoke with journalist and fellow curator Christina Cacouris about Turbeville's work and her upcoming retrospective. 'She has this need to create', Herschdorfer noted at the time. 'As a creator, she uses everything she can'.

Texture isn't only present in Turbeville's collages; her unpolished, coarse aesthetic - nearly always sombre in tone - can be seen across a breadth of her works, many of which were produced in the darkroom, a place home to endless experimentation as tampered negatives gave way to reveal her signature haunting aesthetic. Smeared dust, scratching, tearing and overexposure are all actions integral to understanding Deborah Turbeville the photographer. Conventions were defied as all her images were imbued with a sense of poetry and timelessness, at once disruptive yet also enigmatic and surreal.

Beauty was, in Turbeville’s imagination, not just bright and happy but melancholic and dispirited. Her profound love for distortion created an artificial patina of time, proven by how her three-decade-old photographs are, instead, evocative of the early Victorian era. By highlighting a wide variety of handmade collages spanning four decades, Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage offers a newfound appreciation of Turbeville's undeniable contribution to the history of photography.

Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is an exhibition at Photo Elysée, produced in collaboration with MUUS Collection.

The exhibition will open to the public Friday 3 November, 2023 until 25 February, 2024.