![]() ![]() ![]() She created a remarkable body of work and pointedly disregarded the standard ideas of beauty, engagement and fashion. ![]() When she died in 2013 the art world lost an exceptionally unique and prescient voice. ![]() The result was a chilling but strangely magical panoply of twilit, dust-sheeted chambers that seem to wait, in vain, for Prince Charming's kiss. Deborah Turbeville was a unique force and talent in contemporary fashion photography. Rather than pandering to the palace's ancien-régime glitter, though, the photographer went in search of unused, unrestored rooms, scattering their floors with autumn leaves to emphasize the chambers' desuetude. Dozens of images from that publication will go on view this Friday in "Deborah Turbeville: Unseen Versailles Revisited," an exhibition at Manhattan's Staley-Wise Gallery from January 23 through March 21. "I like to hear a clock ticking in my pictures," Turbeville once observed, and never more poignantly did it tick than in her award-winning book Unseen Versailles (Doubleday, 1982). Instead, Turbeville turned out old-fashioned gelatin prints that seemed to have come straight out of an abandoned attic trunk, their silvered surfaces and expert blurring giving them an air of haute melancholy. The American sample model turned magazine editor turned fashion photographer, who died in 2013 at age 81, trafficked in mysterious images that upended the beauty business's perfectly maquillaged sense of glamour. ![]()
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