Deceased--Deborah Turbeville

Deborah Turbeville
July 6th, 1932 to October 24th, 2013 

 

Style is reminiscent of the early pictorial photographers.

"Deborah Turbeville, Fashion Photographer, Dies at 81"

by

Margalit Fox

October 25th, 2013

The New York Times

Deborah Turbeville, who almost single-handedly turned fashion photography from a clean, well-lighted thing into something dark, brooding and suffused with sensual strangeness, died on Thursday in Manhattan. She was 81.

Her death, at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, was from lung cancer, her agent, Marek Milewicz, said.

Though images like Ms. Turbeville’s — which might include pale, haunted-eyed models in derelict buildings — are practically de rigueur in fashion photography today, they were almost beyond contemplation when she began her work in the early 1970s. She was the only woman, and the only American, in the triumvirate (the others were Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin) that by wide critical consensus changed fashion photography from sedate to shocking.

Ms. Turbeville, who began her career editing fashion magazines, became famous, Women’s Wear Daily wrote in 2009, “for transforming fashion photography into avant-garde art” — a distinction all the more striking in that she was almost completely self-taught.

Her photographs appeared in magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Mirabella; in newspapers including The New York Times; in advertisements for clients like Ralph Lauren, Bruno Magli, Nike, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s; in exhibitions worldwide; and in books, including “Unseen Versailles” (1981), a collection of her photos of the hidden, dusty spaces underpinning Louis XIV’s grand palace.

“Fashion takes itself more seriously than I do,” Ms. Turbeville told The New Yorker in 2011. “I’m not really a fashion photographer.”

In mid-20th-century America, fashion photography was about precisely that: fashion. The clothes, vividly lighted, were front and center, with the models chosen for their well-scrubbed, patrician femininity. They looked, as often as not, as if they had just come from tennis at the country club, though reassuringly free of sweat.

Ms. Turbeville’s photos, by contrast, were unsettling, and they were meant to be. In her fashion work, clothes are almost beside the point. In some images the outfits are barely visible; the same is often true of the models, resulting in an elegiac landscape defined more by absence than by presence.

In a de facto commentary on fashion’s manipulation of women, Ms. Turbeville literally manipulated her negatives — scratching them, tearing them, scattering dust on them and otherwise distressing them — to make the finished images redolent of decay. She employed faded color, black-and-white and sepia tones; prints were often deliberately overexposed, rendering her subjects spectral.

The settings were as striking as the subjects. Ms. Turbeville’s photos are awash in ruin: she favored places like grimy, deserted streets, abandoned warehouses and, in the image that nearly 40 years ago horrified the public and cemented her reputation, a decrepit New York bathhouse.

“I can’t deny that I design the background,” Ms. Turbeville told The Times in 1977. “A woman in my pictures doesn’t just sit there. In what kind of mood would a woman be, wearing whatever? I go into a woman’s private world, where you never go.”

By the late 1970s, articles on photography had begun to refer to “the Deborah Turbeville look,” which, as The New York Times described it in 1977, was “not the kind that mother used to admire in Vogue.”

Unlike other world-renowned fashion photographers, Ms. Turbeville rarely shot the famous, though when she did the results could be startling. In a portrait of Julia Roberts published in The Times Magazine in 2004, Ms. Roberts looks so expressively solemn as to appear on the verge of tears.

For the viewer, the net effect of Ms. Turbeville’s work is one of dreamlike, melancholy beauty. Her images exude an almost palpable sense of longing, with questions about the woeful women they depict — Who are they? Why are they so sad? — hanging unanswered in the air.

Her barren settings leave abundant room for loneliness and loss, and the dissolution they contain is a constant reminder of the passage of time. (“I like to hear a clock ticking in my pictures,” Ms. Turbeville once said.) Her photos seem to depict small, once exquisite worlds that, by the time she clicks the shutter, have already evanesced.

Deborah Lou Turbeville was born in Stoneham, Mass., on July 6, 1932. (Many sources give the year erroneously as 1937 or 1938.) As a young woman she moved to New York, where she was an assistant and sample model to the noted fashion designer Claire McCardell. Afterward, she held editorial positions at Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle, though she deplored the work.

“I’d get a note from some senior fashion editor saying, ‘We find your arrival half an hour late for Bill Blass appalling,’ ” Ms. Turbeville told The Independent, the British newspaper, in 1993. “I just stopped going.”

She began taking photographs on her own in the 1960s, and in 1966, having had no previous instruction, enrolled in a six-month workshop taught by the photographer Richard Avedon and the art director Marvin Israel.

“If it hadn’t been for the two of them, I wouldn’t have taken my photography seriously,” Ms. Turbeville told The Times Magazine in 1981. “It was so out of focus and terrible. The first evening in class, they held up pictures. They said, ‘It isn’t important to have technique, but you must have an idea or inspiration, and we feel the only one who has is this person who’s never taken a photograph before.’ I became very unpopular in the class.”
In 1975 Ms. Turbeville produced an image that would become, The Independent wrote in 1993, “one of the most famous fashion photographs of the last 50 years.” Part of a swimsuit shoot for Vogue, it showed five listless women leaning against the walls of a shower room in a condemned New York bathhouse.

Writing in The Times late that year, Hilton Kramer reviewed an exhibition at Hofstra University that included the image, calling it “one of the most beautifully composed pictures in the show,” but going on to say, “Yet its ‘Marat/Sade’ imagery leaves one wondering if we have not moved beyond the boundaries of fashion photography.”

The reaction from others was even more strident.

“People started talking about Auschwitz and lesbians and drugs,” Ms. Turbeville recalled in an interview quoted in the 1991 book “Appearances: Fashion Photography Since 1945,” by Martin Harrison. “And all I was doing was trying to design five figures in space.”

Ms. Turbeville won an American Book Award in 1982 for “Unseen Versailles,” a project for which she had been recruited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday. The volume, with an introduction by the novelist Louis Auchincloss, documented the echoing, long-disused backstairs rooms that visitors never see. (To heighten their autumnal aspect, Ms. Turbeville smuggled in armfuls of dead leaves.)

She and Mr. Auchincloss also collaborated on “Deborah Turbeville’s Newport Remembered” (1994), which captured the vanished Gilded Age in all its crumbling particulars.

Among her other books are “Wallflower” (1978), a collection of misty, death-imbued fashion photographs; “Studio St. Petersburg” (1997), shot in Russia; “Casa No Name” (2009), shot in Mexico, where she long had a home; and “Deborah Turbeville: The Fashion Pictures” (2011).

Ms. Turbeville, who lived part of each year in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, is survived by a brother, Thomas.

She also maintained an apartment in the Ansonia, the Beaux-Arts pile on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There, she left generations of old paint unstripped, speckled mirrors unsilvered, threadbare tapestry unrestored and tattered curtains unmended.

From W magazine...

The world of fashion photography--Ellen von Unwerth

Ellen von Unwerth

Wendybird

2006

Erin Fetherston's Fall/Winter collection

It is a tough row to hoe. More than just knowing people in the industry, one must have talent.

Ellen von Unwerth [Wikipedia]

Deceased--Lillian Bassman

Lillian Bassman
June 15th, 1917 to February 13th, 2012

Lillian Bassman and Husband Paul Himmel

1940s

"Fashion photographer Lillian Bassman dead at 94"

February 14th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Photographer Lillian Bassman came on the fashion scene in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, shooting elegant wasp-waisted women, art directing at Junior Bazaar and inspiring the designers whose creations she photographed.

She left the fashion scene in the 1970s but returned 20 years later, thanks to some assists from the painter Helen Frankenthaler and photo historian Martin Harrison. Within the last few years, the art and fashion world declared that she was in the midst of a renaissance and renewed interest in her work led to a new book and exhibitions around the world.

Bassman died Monday in New York. She was 94.

According to an obituary in the New York Times, during her first flourishing, Bassman "became highly sought after for her expressive portraits of slender, long-necked models advertising lingerie, cosmetics and fabrics. Her lingerie work in particular brought lightness and glamour to an arena previously known for heavy, middle-aged women posing in industrial-strength corsets."

Bassman's work was featured at the Peter Fetterman Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica in 2010. Her work was published in "Lillian Bassman" in 1997 and "Lillian Bassman: Women" in 2009.

At one time her favorite model was Barbara Mullen, above, noted for her 20-inch waist. "There are models that are not models but muses," Bassman recalled in a 2010 article in the Los Angeles Times. "She had everything marvelous: a beautiful neck, grace, the ability to respond to me.

"We used to get on the floor, and when I get excited, I take my shoes off," she continued. "The two of us would dance. We understood each other."

Mullen agreed. "I felt absolutely wonderful when I moved with Lillian....it was like being heaven."

"Lillian Bassman, Fashion and Fine-Art Photographer, Dies at 94"

by

William Grimes

February 13th, 2012

The New York Times

Lillian Bassman, a magazine art director and fashion photographer who achieved renown in the 1940s and ’50s with high-contrast, dreamy portraits of sylphlike models, then re-emerged in the ’90s as a fine-art photographer after a cache of lost negatives resurfaced, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.

Her son, Eric Himmel, confirmed the death.

Ms. Bassman entered the world of magazine editing and fashion photography as a protégé of Alexey Brodovitch, the renowned art director of Harper’s Bazaar. In late 1945, when the magazine generated a spinoff called Junior Bazaar, aimed at teenage girls, she was asked to be its art director, a title she shared with Mr. Brodovitch, at his insistence.

In addition to providing innovative graphic design, Ms. Bassman gave prominent display to future photographic stars like Richard Avedon, Robert Frank and Louis Faurer, whose work whetted her appetite to become a photographer herself.

Already, at Harper’s Bazaar, she had begun frequenting the darkroom on her lunch hours to develop images by the great fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene, using tissues and gauzes to bring selected areas of a picture into focus and applying bleach to manipulate tone.

“I was interested in developing a method of printing on my own, even before I took photographs,” Ms. Bassman told B&W magazine in 1994. “I wanted everything soft edges and cropped.” She was interested, she said, in “creating a new kind of vision aside from what the camera saw.”

When Avedon went off to photograph fashion collections in Paris in 1947, he lent her his studio and an assistant. She continued her self-education and in short order landed an important account with a lingerie company. In its last issue, in May 1948, Junior Bazaar ran a seven-page portfolio of wedding photographs she had taken, titled “Happily Ever After.”

Ms. Bassman became highly sought after for her expressive portraits of slender, long-necked models advertising lingerie, cosmetics and fabrics. Her lingerie work in particular brought lightness and glamour to an arena previously known for heavy, middle-aged women posing in industrial-strength corsets.

“I had a terrific commercial life,” Ms. Bassman told The New York Times in 1997. “I did everything that could be photographed: children, food, liquor, cigarettes, lingerie, beauty products.”

Lillian Violet Bassman was born on June 15, 1917, in Brooklyn and grew up in the Bronx. Her parents, Jewish émigrés from Russia, allowed her a bohemian style of life, even letting her move in, at 15, with the man she would later marry, the documentary photographer Paul Himmel.

Ms. Bassman studied fabric design at Textile High School, a vocational school in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. After modeling for artists employed by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project and working as a muralist’s assistant, she took a night course in fashion illustration at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

She soon showed her work to Brodovitch, who was impressed. Waiving tuition, he accepted her into his Design Laboratory at the New School for Social Research, where she changed her emphasis from fashion illustration to graphic design.

Brodovitch took her on as his unpaid apprentice at Harper’s Bazaar in 1941, but desperate to earn money she left to become an assistant to the art director at Elizabeth Arden, whereupon Brodovitch anointed her his first paid assistant. Like her mentor, she was artistically daring. At Junior Bazaar, she experimented with abandon, treating fashion in a bold, graphic style and floating images in space.

“One week we decided that we were going to do all green vegetables, so we had the designers make all green clothing, green lipstick, green hair, green everything,” she told Print magazine in 2006.

Her nonadvertising work appeared frequently in Harper’s Bazaar, and she developed close relationships with a long list of the era’s top models, including Barbara Mullen (her muse), Dovima and Suzy Parker.

The stylistic changes of the 1960s, however, left her cold. The models, too. “I got sick of them,” she told The Times in 2009. “They were becoming superstars. They were not my kind of models. They were dictating rather than taking direction.”

In 1969, disappointed with the photographic profession and her prospects, she destroyed most of her commercial negatives. She put more than 100 editorial negatives in trash bags, putting them aside in her converted carriage house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She soon forgot all about them.

By the mid-1970s, she was out of the fashion world entirely and had begun focusing on her own work, taking large-format Cibachrome photographs of glistening fruits, vegetables and flowers, pictures of cracks in the city streets and distorted male torsos based on photographs in bodybuilding magazines.

It was not until the early 1990s that Martin Harrison, a fashion curator and historian who was staying at her house, found the long-forgotten negatives. He encouraged her to revisit them.

Ms. Bassman took a fresh look at the earlier work. She began reprinting the negatives, applying some of the bleaching techniques and other toning agents with which she had first experimented in the 1940s, creating more abstract, mysterious prints.

“In looking at them I got a little intrigued, and I took them into the darkroom, and I started to do my own thing on them,” she told The Times. “I was able to make my own choices, other than what Brodovitch or the editors had made.”

Her reinterpretations, as she called them, found a new generation of admirers. A full-fledged revival of her career ensued, with gallery shows and international exhibitions, including a joint retrospective at the Deichtorhallen museum in Hamburg with her husband and a series of monographs devoted to her photography.

A one-woman show at the Hamiltons Gallery in London, organized by Mr. Harrison in 1993, was followed by exhibitions at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris and an assignment from The New York Times Magazine to cover the haute couture collections in Paris in 1996. She completed her last fashion assignment for German Vogue in 2004.

Mr. Himmel died in 2009, having abandoned photography in his late 50s to become a psychiatric caregiver in the city’s hospitals and later a psychiatrist in private practice. Besides her son, the editor in chief of Abrams Books, she is survived by a daughter, Liza Himmel, known as Lizzie; two grandchildren; and a step-grandchild.

Ms. Bassman’s work has been published in “Lillian Bassman” (1997) and “Lillian Bassman: Women” (2009). A new book, “Lillian Bassman: Lingerie,” is to be published by Abrams on April 1.

Lillian Bassman [Wikipedia]