After being introduced to Diana Vreeland, Turbeville was eventually offered a job as an editor at Harper’s Bazaar. Born in 1932, Turbeville moved to New York following her schooling, where she became an assistant and house model to designer Claire McCardell. Often reduced to the narrow label of fashion photographer, Turbeville is poised, with this reappraisal of her work, to take her rightful place within the pantheon of 20 th century photographers.ĭeborah Turbeville (1932-2013) was an American artist who made her mark on fashion photography in the 1970s and then developed a personal work that is unlike any other – mysterious and timeless photographs as if from another era – imposing her vision even in commissioned work. Passport is as much a portfolio bringing together the best of Turbeville’s work as it is a cinematographic narrative sequence that can be read as the artist’s biography. From the 1970s and over a period of 40 years, she created works not only with her camera, but also while revisiting her own archives - manipulating, tearing, scratching, pinning, taping and gluing her negatives and prints with her own handwriting and printed text.

As with Turbeville’s entire oeuvre, the imagery of Passport resonates with an eerie, timeless melancholy, and a patina that imbues it with the distance of a haunting memory.īy unveiling Passport, MUUS introduces Turbeville as a prolific artist who produced idiosyncratic artworks with a unique signature style. In its sequencing, the narrative of Passport is evocative of cinema, reading as both a fictional story and a personal statement relating to the artist’s life, her relationships, and her career in the fashion industry. The pages of Passport showcase works created throughout Turbeville’s fruitful career and are brought together by the artist in this portfolio. A video installation features the entirety of Passport as well as an introduction to the MUUS facilities. The exhibition is the Paris Photo-debut of MUUS Collection, which recently acquired the Turbeville archive.

Passport is curated by Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of the Museum of Fine Arts Le Locle, Switzerland, and curator of Elles x Paris Photo. This exhibition features a selection of prints from the 120-page artwork of the same name.

The MUUS Collection presents the exhibition of Deborah Turbeville’s never-before-seen Passport, a 1990s body of unique photo-collages.

Turbeville deborah