Chelsea, New York
Deborah Turbeville
Rainy Day People
Foxy ProductionFoxy Production proudly presents Rainy Day People, a series of photographs by Deborah Turbeville (1932-2013), commissioned in 1995 for L’Uomo Vogue. With a moody, after-the-deluge Western theme, Turbeville builds a narrative that is at once mysterious, suspenseful, and sensual. Turbeville expanded fashion photography’s horizons beyond its mercantile remit into an ethereal, highly charged mix of portraiture, architecture, and landscape. Her work’s abiding theme is the framing of the self, in all its multiplicity and fragmentation: “Feeling surreal and dislocated—it’s my favorite way to feel,” said Turbeville. Channeling the maestros of art cinema – Carné, Cocteau, and Tarkovsky – she infuses her photographs with an atmosphere that is enigmatically psychological. Turbeville’s photographs appeared regularly from the 1970s onward in Zoom, French Camera, and American, French, and Italian Vogue. Her iconoclastic attitude to the conventions of fashion photography has had an inestimable influence on contemporary fashion photographers as well as many artists. Deborah Turbeville (Stoneham, MA, 1932-2013) exhibited at Sonnabend, New York and Paris; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museo Contemporaneo, Mexico City; and the Russian Museum, Stroganoff Palace, St. Petersburg, among other venues. Publications include Deborah Turbeville: The Fashion Pictures (2011), published by Rizzoli; and Unseen Versailles (1981), commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for Doubleday.