Deborah Turbeville is a renowned master of fashion photography whose career shows a successful combination of artistic and commercial photography. Her works appear regularly in Vogue, Mirabella, Zoom, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, her clients include Nike, Oscar de la Renta, Ralph Lauren, Ungaro, Valentino, Vera Wang. Her personal exhibitions have been shown in Centre Pompidou in Paris, Sonnabend Gallery (New-York), various spaces in Rome, Mexico, Tokyo, and in the Russian Museum, in 1997. Once a student of Avedon, Turbeville was then among those who founded the International Centre for Photography in New York. In 2005 she was presented with the ICP Infinity Award for Applied Photography, and by that time several books of her photography had been already issued. Deborah regularly teaches photography, both in and outside the U.S. Her cooperation with the Centre of Photography in St. Petersburg began several years ago, during one of her first visits in Russia. In 2002, Deborah conducted a workshop for Baltic Photography School (division of the NCP) which resulted in an exhibition entitled ‘Strange City’, in Rumyantsev mansion.
The exhibition in the Centre of Photography is in a way a retrospective of the material accumulated by the author during her visits to our country over several years. Black-and-white and color, large and small formats, collages – Turbeville made the selection very carefully, searching for works that looked to her most expressive of the character of Russia. In fact, Russia to her is primarily St. Petersburg. And the choice is conscious: having been initially introduced to Russia through works and memoirs of Dostoevsky, Mandelshtam, Akhmatova, Dyagilev, Brodsky, through creations of famous Russian choreographers and composers, Turbeville perceives St.Petersburg with its tragic faith as the personification of what she calls ‘Russian time’. This notion, undefinable and elusive, is concerned rather with memories and echoes of the past, with premonition and determinancy of the future than with the present, and is inseparable from sadness. Georgy Golenki, art critic, expressed this very well: “Turbeville has managed to convey this very delicate, intangible and very St.-Petersburg effect, this weight of hidden sadness upon lives of people and things, the sadness starting in the past and extending into the future” (Camera Obscura, Issue 4, 1998). Deborah doesn’t try to make reportage and doesn’t aim to capture the ‘decisive moment’; she works mainly with staged photography, conducting a very careful, precise, and intuitive search for what could express the essence of St. Petersburg and the ‘Russian soul’ – a search that is dated in hundreds of years. In Turbeville’s photographs, models, dancers, common people, together with architecture or interiors of half-ruined palaces surrounding them, become characters of a time existing beyond present and of this narration appealing to emotion rather than sense.
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