Turbeville, who died in 2013, was making these pictures as the feminist movement became part of a national consciousness, with women’s fashion and photography within advertising were going through their own changes. As if to amplify this quality, Turbeville tacked her mottled collages, marked with her own handwritten captions, to kraft paper, making them not only photos but also objects, like some found relic. Petersburg, circus performers in Budapest, and spectral wraiths in Normandy forests. She conjured the ghosts of Mariinsky dancers in St. In their evocation of a disintegrated aristocracy and last gasps of the Old World, the Versailles pictures introduced an abiding theme in Turbeville’s work. In these, listless models slump in Louis XIV chairs in crumbling drawing rooms shrouded in sheets as though in a Magritte painting. This deathly quality was at its height in Unseen Versailles, a dirge of eroded opulence and moth-chewed glamour, commissioned in 1981 by Jacqueline Onassis (Onassis had a preternatural eye for pioneering photography she published William Eggleston’s Democratic Forest a few years later). They do not so much obsess over death as trail it along behind them. The writer Nancy Hall-Duncan recalled critics who saw the shots as “evoking the grisly aura of a concentration camp or the frightening vacuousness of a drugged stupor”.Īdditionally featured in the show are her Diana Vreeland studies The Last Empress, a collage of test shots which capture the mythic editor’s imperious humor the series Woman in the Woods for Italian Vogue and l’Heure entre Chien et Loup, where Turbeville’s phantasmic subjects appear removed from time entirely. The series is cited among the premier examples of fashion photography, but their immediate reception was less gracious. Represented in the exhibition is There’s More to a Bathing Suit than Meets the Eye, the 1975 swimsuit spread for American Vogue now colloquially known as simply The Bathhouse S eries, in which gaunt, glass-eyed models are arranged in an abandoned New York bathhouse.
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