By Condé Nast Archive
By Ivan Shaw
Karl Lagerfeld with Marie-France Acquaviva and Stephane Audran, Vogue (1975-02-01) by Deborah TurbevilleCondé Nast Archive
Turbeville was new to Vogue in 1975 (her first photograph appears in January), but she wasn’t new to fashion. Born in Massachusetts in 1932, Turbeville dropped out of college and headed to New York to become an assistant and house model to fashion designer Claire McCardell.
Jerry Hall in a Gold Silk Dress, Vogue (1977-09-01) by Deborah TurbevilleCondé Nast Archive
She then moved on to the fashion department at Harper’s Bazaar and took a workshop offered by photographer Richard Avedon and art director Marvin Israel, who were both quick to take note of this nascent talent’s clear point of view.
Jean Muir and Friends, Vogue (1975-02-01) by Deborah TurbevilleCondé Nast Archive
It was a fresh perspective and far superior to any of the other students' work. And so Turbeville segued from fashion editing to photography. Turbeville made a point of dismissing her background in the industry, once telling a reporter, “I’m not really a fashion photographer.”
Model in Elisabeth Stewart Bathing Suit, Vogue (1975-06-01) by Deborah TurbevilleCondé Nast Archive
For Turbeville it was the ideas behind the pictures that fascinated her. Her vision was informed by her own childhood, literary references, surrealism, and romanticism, and she created strange, lonely worlds for her models to inhabit, both physically and psychologically.
She used clothes almost as costumes in these “sets.” In fact, the first portfolio of work Turbeville showed to Vogue’s editors contained no fashion at all. Instead she brought a group of photographs she’d taken in Ogunquit, Maine, where she had spent summers as a child.
As she explained in her 2011 book, Deborah Turbeville, The Fashion Pictures, her goal had been to document a family for one year in the “very sorry, very sinister, very beautiful” rugged Maine landscape.
In contrast, there’s a sense of interiority in the 26-page portfolio on “the movers” of American and European fashion Turbeville took for the February issue for which the photographer captured top fashion designers like Halston at his sleekly minimal Manhattan home and Yves Saint Laurent in Paris with his muses Loulou de la Falaise and Marina Schiano.
In the May issue, a swimwear story would become hers – and one of Vogue's– most controversial of all time. Alexander Liberman, the magazine’s editorial director at the time, “liked to have a chat in his office” with a photographer before an assignment. Turbeville left the magazine’s headquarters with instructions—“Do five girls across a double-page spread”—and a challenge. “Do something remarkable, dear,” Liberman told Turbeville. “ I’m expecting it!”
Models in Purple Bathing Suits, Vogue (1975-05-01) by Deborah TurbevilleCondé Nast Archive
Voyeurism isn’t the right word, but there was a palpable sense of removal in Turbeville’s work. Her models rarely faced the camera, and so her lens would seem to function as a peephole.
The effect was amplified when she chose a turn-of-the century bathhouse, scouted by a friend, as the location of her swimwear shoot.
Six models were cast for the sitting, overseen by fashion editor Polly Mellen, and were posed in the bathhouse’s marble-tiled changing rooms and shower stalls.
“The mood on set was intense most times because natural light was being used (which can change quickly),” remembers makeup artist Sandy Linter. “Debbie was quiet but always a bit nervous and excitable.”
Models in White Maillots, Vogue (1975-05-01) by Deborah TurbevilleCondé Nast Archive
With an exception:
When model Sunny Redmond started playing with body shapes, Linter says, “Debbie would encourage her. ‘Yes, yes, like that!’ And so Sunny would give her more and more and then finally the split!” Not surprisingly, this is the best known of the six images published.
In retrospect, the story’s title, “There’s More to a Bathing Suit Than Meets the Eye,” seems prophetic. The reaction to the portfolio was extreme. It wasn’t the swimwear that was objectionable; some viewers felt that these images depicted and glamorized anorexia or drug abuse; others reacted against what they perceived as a lesbian undertone to the images. Most disturbing were accusations that Turbeville had referenced Nazi concentration camps. The photographer dismissed all of these interpretations, saying, “All I was doing was trying to design six figures in space. Sometimes the best things you do, the most controversial, are done in complete innocence.”
