If my memory is correct, the controversy was even reported on the six o’clock news. Some charged the images evoked Auschwitz (really?), others that they suggested some kind of lesbian brothel (oh, the days before the The L Word!), or a decrepit asylum (there was some truth to this one, but the patients were so well dressed!).Īnh and Rozima in Emanuel Ungaro, Chateau Raray, France, Vogue, 1986 For Vogue, this was a radically new way of portraying women, and many readers responded with outrage.

Although beautiful, they weren’t presented as a gathering of beauties, but as isolated individuals. The images were grainy and faded, and the quintet of models looked languid and dreamy, barely aware of the photographer, much less each other. I had been in awe of her since my teens, when she rocked the fashion world with one of her early assignments for Vogue, a 10-page spread of swimsuit-and-beachwear-clad models shot in an aging bathhouse in lower Manhattan in 1975. I can’t remember why the parcel couldn’t be sent by messenger - Condé Nast had its own fleet of cyclists - but looking back on it now, turning a mundane and anonymous task into a personal rendezvous was very much in keeping with who Turbeville was. Offering a foil to the work of her contemporary, Helmut Newton, whose provocative photos exposed taboos and played with sexual innuendo, Turbeville’s work grappled with the interior life of women and their changing place at a time when longstanding gender roles were as distorted as the reflections from a disco ball.Way back in the early 1980s, when I was an editorial assistant at Vogue, my boss asked me to go to the apartment of the fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville to pick up a parcel from her on my way to work the following morning. In Turbeville’s photos, models almost never look at the camera, and the clothes-those innocuous, powder-hued separates of the seventies and eighties-play a secondary role to the women who wear them. “Feeling surreal and dislocated-it’s my favorite way to feel,” the photographer once told Vogue, and she gave visual form to those emotions in her atmospheric images, which, like the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, have an unsettling dream-like quality in which location and composition take precedence over the figure.

Not the clean, bright burst of a summer floral, but something moody and mysterious that captures the essence of the decaying bloom and the soft-focus haze of memory. Deborah Turbeville’s photographs, which are the subject of a new exhibition at New York’s Staley Wise gallery, are as evocative as a lingering trace of fragrance.

Deborah turbeville photography