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Deborah Turbeville Polaroids: Scratching the Surface
Curated by Joel Smith
Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography
The Morgan Library & Museum
The Photography Show at AIPAD 2024
The photography of Deborah Turbeville is full of cinematic business. Besides the labor of costume (just enough to fulfill her duty to fashion), there is close attention to staging, atmosphere, story-like situations. Much work is done, too, by her carefully scouted, more or less gothic locales: chateaux, forests at twilight, empty greenhouses and bathhouses.
Over it all falls the scrim of special effects. A vocabulary of accident and decay gives Turbeville’s prints a physical intimacy; it is easy to imagine you are the only one fixating on pockmarks and stains while other viewers concern themselves with the pictures.
The photography of Deborah Turbeville is full of cinematic business. Besides the labor of costume (just enough to fulfill her duty to fashion), there is close attention to staging, atmosphere, story-like situations. Much work is done, too, by her carefully scouted, more or less gothic locales: chateaux, forests at twilight, empty greenhouses and bathhouses.
Over it all falls the scrim of special effects. A vocabulary of accident and decay gives Turbeville’s prints a physical intimacy; it is easy to imagine you are the only one fixating on pockmarks and stains while other viewers concern themselves with the pictures.
The photography of Deborah Turbeville is full of cinematic business. Besides the labor of costume (just enough to fulfill her duty to fashion), there is close attention to staging, atmosphere, story-like situations. Much work is done, too, by her carefully scouted, more or less gothic locales: chateaux, forests at twilight, empty greenhouses and bathhouses.
Over it all falls the scrim of special effects. A vocabulary of accident and decay gives Turbeville’s prints a physical intimacy; it is easy to imagine you are the only one fixating on pockmarks and stains while other viewers concern themselves with the pictures.
The photography of Deborah Turbeville is full of cinematic business. Besides the labor of costume (just enough to fulfill her duty to fashion), there is close attention to staging, atmosphere, story-like situations. Much work is done, too, by her carefully scouted, more or less gothic locales: chateaux, forests at twilight, empty greenhouses and bathhouses.
Over it all falls the scrim of special effects. A vocabulary of accident and decay gives Turbeville’s prints a physical intimacy; it is easy to imagine you are the only one fixating on pockmarks and stains while other viewers concern themselves with the pictures.
Two stories, then, meet at the surface of a Turbeville print: the frankly fictive world within the image, and the clear signs, here on the real-world side, of the life lived by the print.
Inside her Polaroids, a third type of narrative stirs. Each Polaroid contains a packet of time unique to it: the span of a few minutes during which the chemical image took shape. The development process erases its own tracks, but Turbeville’s surface effects keep you conscious of it: a piece of technical business as private, and as decisive, as the changes that occur inside a chrysalis.
Two stories, then, meet at the surface of a Turbeville print: the frankly fictive world within the image, and the clear signs, here on the real-world side, of the life lived by the print.
Inside her Polaroids, a third type of narrative stirs. Each Polaroid contains a packet of time unique to it: the span of a few minutes during which the chemical image took shape. The development process erases its own tracks, but Turbeville’s surface effects keep you conscious of it: a piece of technical business as private, and as decisive, as the changes that occur inside a chrysalis.
Two stories, then, meet at the surface of a Turbeville print: the frankly fictive world within the image, and the clear signs, here on the real-world side, of the life lived by the print.
Inside her Polaroids, a third type of narrative stirs. Each Polaroid contains a packet of time unique to it: the span of a few minutes during which the chemical image took shape. The development process erases its own tracks, but Turbeville’s surface effects keep you conscious of it: a piece of technical business as private, and as decisive, as the changes that occur inside a chrysalis.
Two stories, then, meet at the surface of a Turbeville print: the frankly fictive world within the image, and the clear signs, here on the real-world side, of the life lived by the print.
Inside her Polaroids, a third type of narrative stirs. Each Polaroid contains a packet of time unique to it: the span of a few minutes during which the chemical image took shape. The development process erases its own tracks, but Turbeville’s surface effects keep you conscious of it: a piece of technical business as private, and as decisive, as the changes that occur inside a chrysalis.
Turbeville’s stories do not resolve any more than a dream does. If her work has closure, it is that of the self-contained cycle between consciousness and dream, with stress on the dreamer’s thoughtful hesitation between the two states.
Turbeville’s stories do not resolve any more than a dream does. If her work has closure, it is that of the self-contained cycle between consciousness and dream, with stress on the dreamer’s thoughtful hesitation between the two states.
Turbeville’s stories do not resolve any more than a dream does. If her work has closure, it is that of the self-contained cycle between consciousness and dream, with stress on the dreamer’s thoughtful hesitation between the two states.
Turbeville’s stories do not resolve any more than a dream does. If her work has closure, it is that of the self-contained cycle between consciousness and dream, with stress on the dreamer’s thoughtful hesitation between the two states.
