'Obliterate it a little so you never have it completely there.' It's a quite un-American world, a view through the rear window, fascinated by the beaten, worn and forgotten. 'I destroy the image after I've made it,' said Turbeville. Consciously damaged goods, they are blurry, grainy, tormented into painterly colours, scratched, marked, sellotaped - post-production work often done with her long-term assistant and collaborator Sharon Schuster. Her pictures are as much riddles as they are images. Perhaps even more than those two louche Europeans, though, she injected narrative and mystery into what is, after all, an unabashedly commercial process. Like her near contemporaries, Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, she rethought and recast fashion photography in the 1970s. The uneasy shuffle of ambiguity is the essence of Turbeville and her work - which itself shuffles between fashion magazine and art gallery, never fully at peace in either place. Yet her mother described her as a 'shy and scary child'. Life was comfortable - she went to private school. 'Very bleak, very stark, very beautiful,' was Turbeville's description of it. 'Beautiful Place by the Sea' is the oceanside township's motto. Deborah Turbeville was born in 1938, in Boston.
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