Deborah Lou Turbeville, American fashion photographer
died last October, 2013. She is credited
with adding a darker, almost Gothic more brooding element to fashion photography beginning in the early 1970s.
Fashion photography
was notoriously done in well-lit spaces, Turbeville wanted to create images
that were edgier that with a sensuality and strangeness, glamour and decay. She created her own
worlds inhabited by pale, haunted eyed models many times photographed in derelict
buildings. In 2009, Women's Wear Daily wrote
that Tuberville transformed "fashion photography into avant-garde art, — a distinction all the
more striking in that she was almost completely self-taught.
The worlds Turbeville created are many times de
rigueur in fashion photography today. She was the only woman and the only
American in the triumvirate of Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and herself who
changed fashion photography from safe to one that shocked the viewer. It wasn't just about the clothes anymore, Turbeville created her own dark fairy tales where the model and the clothes all became part of the Turbeville world.
Books with Turbeville's photographs
