Deborah Turbeville

Deborah Lou Turbeville (July 6, 1932 – October 24, 2013) was an American fashion photographer. Although she started out as a fashion editor at Harper's Bazaar, she became a photographer in the 70s. She is widely credited with adding a darker, more brooding element to fashion photography, beginning in the early 1970s – she, Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton changed it from traditional, well-lit images into something much more "edgy" looking. However, unlike the "urban erotic underworld" portrayed by her contemporaries, Turbeville's aesthetic tended towards "dreamy and mysterious," a delicate female gaze. She was the only woman and only American among this trio. In 2009, Women's Wear Daily wrote that Tuberville transformed "fashion photography into avant-garde art." Her photographs appeared in numerous publications and fashion advertisements, including ads for Bloomingdale's, Bruno Magli, Nike, Ralph Lauren and Macy's.

Born in 1932 in Stoneham, Massachusetts, Turbeville died from lung cancer at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan on October 24, 2013, at the age of 81.

According to Turbeville, her work was deeply inspired by her childhood: "I am like a child, I must manage it every hour of every day." She was born into a wealthy family in New England that desired to be both distinguished and isolated, but paradoxically suffered from this isolation.

Her paternal grandfather had dreamed of being a painter in Paris. Upon his return to the United States, he bought a large house, isolated in the periphery of Boston, which Deborah's mother and aunts inherited. Deborah's father, who was from Texas, also lived in the house. This familial community, which cultivated its members' intellectual superiority through frequent trips to Boston's opera and cinemas, also suffered from this exile in the suburbs: "My mother deeply despised mediocrity, and that's what this kind of small city represented for her."

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