Deborah Turbeville: Under Hidden Layers

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” This excerpt from Susan Sontag’s book On Photography serves as an epigraph to a recent monograph, Deborah Turbeville: Under Hidden Layers.

This slim, large-format book by the art historian Maeva Dubrez, published by Acteditions in Switzerland, marks a new groove in a well-trodden path of Turbeville scholarship. The oversized, XL format of the book, bound only by an elastic cord (the middle pages can come out and be used as a poster), gives Turbeville’s photography, which Dubrez curated from MUUS foundation, the owner of Turbeville’s archive, a new dimension. It makes one dwell on the physicality of the book itself, because the quality of the paper and print come through very clearly, becoming something to consider in itself. This is worth remarking on, because it’s an increasingly rare occasion that an object itself partakes in experiencing an art book, which also provides a tactile way to experience the art itself. 

The cover is a Turbeville negative, printed in silver ink, of two women standing in a doorway. It is typical Turbeville – an unfinished story that invites your imagination to fill in the blanks. And filling in the blanks, as its title suggests, is what the book invites one to do, in three essays slotted in-between the images, some previously unpublished, and in an interview with Bertrand Cardon, who was Turbeville’s assistant in the ‘80s (her apparent unconcern for the technical aspects of photography is endearing to those who knew Turbeville’s otherworldly mind.)

Debrez insists on paying attention to the spectral quality of Turbeville’s photos, which is not hard to do, since this was one of Turbeville’s main aesthetic devices. What’s more interesting is Debrez’s thesis that this ghostliness in Turbeville’s work has a cinematic, rather than a photographic quality, meaning the former has continuity while the latter is a clearly delineated snapshot. Turbeville indeed loved film, and could talk about it for hours. She found much of contemporary culture crass, and this is one of the reasons her photographs have an out-of-time air to them. And if you squint just so, perhaps their cinematic quality will be apparent as well.

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Deborah Turbeville: Under Hidden Layers is out now, available at select bookshops. 

All images courtesy of the publisher.