In the method / madness of photography a collage holds a rather underexplored space. It is a bit of an afterthought, compared to the pantheon in which most memorable photographic images rest. This is an oversight. A collage occupies an in-between space of still and moving image. It’s not exactly animated, but it’s not exactly static either. A good photo collage has a kinetic quality to it that adds time to the space-time continuum; it has the ability to shift perspective just so.
Collages were indispensable to the work of Deborah Turbeville, one of the American photography greats. Her images have always had an early cinematic quality; in a way they exist out of time. Turbeville’s collages brought time to life without putting a timestamp on them. If photography is storytelling, then Turbeville’s collages told stories in ethereal, fairytale ways.
One can hardly say that Turbeville’s collages are underexplored – they were indispensable to her work. But for the first time we have a book (and a museum exhibit) expressly dedicated to them. Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage (Thames & Hudson, $75) takes a deep dive into Turbeville’s collage practice over its 240 pages and 188 illustrations.
The title of the book and its ostensible subject is a bit misleading – plenty of images in it are not collages. Regardless, even the stills juxtaposed on opposite pages of a spread possess a sequential quality of a collage. According to the press release that accompanied the book, many of the images in it are published for the first time.
As mentioned above, the book accompanies the eponymous exhibition opening at Photo Elysee in Lausanne, Switzerland, and therefore was edited by the museum’s curator, Nathalie Herschdorfer. Heavyweights like the New Yorker photo critic Vince Aletti, and the long time editor of Vogue Italia Carla Sozzani, who commissioned (according to Aletti) some of Turbeville’s best work.
The press release casts Turbeville in a trendy, identity-politics driven light, which has been slowly poisoning the art world over the last few decades, and much more quickly in the last few years. It depicts her as the rare successful female fashion and art photographer who cast a decidedly female gaze onto her subjects, as opposed to the male photographers (many of them gay), whose edge came from hyper-sexualizing women. This position is actually valid, but having known Deborah, she would absolutely balk at any reductivist representation of her work, as would any artist that values complexity and nuance, the two indispensable qualities that permeate Turbeville’s work, that give it the kind of gravitas that makes the experience of looking at her pictures transportive.
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Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is out today, Nov 14th, 2023.
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All images courtesy of the publisher.