Fragments of the unseen.

• Author: Suro, Federico
• Position: Photographer Deborah Turbeville

WITH EXTRAORDINARY SENSITIVITY and a unique technique, Deborah Turbeville has reached beyond the realm of immediate reality to capture the imperceivable. Few photographers have had such an original and personal vision. Over the past twenty years she has created hundreds of haunting, breathtaking images for magazines, books, advertising firms, museums and galleries throughout the world. This body of work has left an indelible mark on the development of modern photography.

Born in Boston, Turbeville started her career in the worlds of haute couture, which served as a stimulating training ground and catapulted her to international fame. During these formative years, her sense of style and the aesthetic was shaped largely by Claire McCardell, one of the most seminal figures in American fashion and Turbeville's mentor. As a fashion photographer, she worked with leading designers such as Sonia Rykiel, Ungaro, Romeo Gigli and Karl Lagerfeld. Her portfolios have appeared in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Mirabella, where she continues to be a regular contributor. Nevertheless, the world of high fashion was hampering to her restless spirit and rarely afforded true artistic release. If she was not always fully appreciated or understood by some of the more fickle participants of that ephemeral sphere, it is because she was simply too complex.

In 1981 Turbeville gave the public her unique insight into the quintessential French palace with the publication of Unseen Versailles. The results were mesmerizing. Ostensibly, the "unseen" in the title refers to those areas not representative of the extravagant Versailles and seldom visited by tourists. In actuality, it was Turbeville's personal vision that had not yet been seen. She avoided the banal and the obvious and instead pursued the more mysterious, sensual route. This palace, a favorite subject for generations of photographers since France's nineteenth-century Eugene Atget, had never taken on the properties with which she imbued it. Turbeville did something far more intricate than clicking the button on a camera - she evoked the presence of a life long since departed by concretizing bits and pieces of the imagined. Now a collector's item, Unseen Versailles won the 1981 United States National Book Award for best photography.

As a follow-up, Turbeville turned her lens on the Eastern Europe of Franz Kafka, with its intense underlying expressionism. A large part of this work will be seen in her forthcoming book...