Deborah Turbeville remembered by Franca Sozzani

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/dec/15/deborah-turbeville-obituary-franca-sozzani-vogue

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I first met Deborah about 30 years ago when I was working at Lei magazine. It was a very successful youth-oriented title. I was trying to do a different take on fashion and style using younger photographers such as Paolo Roversi, Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel and Mario Testino, all of whom I later brought to Vogue with me. I saw these pictures she did of girls in an old school house and in a dancing school. Just so atmospheric and beautiful.

I loved Deborah's work because it was original yet recognisable. She had a style, a signature. I wanted her in the mix because she was so individual and her style was timeless, even though it was black and white. She was all about atmosphere. Even when the backdrops were not beautiful, which was often the case, she transformed them and made the decay of old buildings seem dream-like. Sometimes an art director would say that her shots were out of focus, but that was her way of making the world seem otherworldly.

Deborah never really had the recognition or the success she deserved. She knew Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton, but she did not get their recognition. People in the fashion world like more commercial photographers and she never cared to become commercial. Plus, she had to like what she was doing for the passion to be there. If she ended up on a shoot she didn't like, I have to say, you heard about it. It was, "I don't like this place. I don't like this model." She would complain for hours.

Deborah was utterly individual, both in her work and her life. She was stylish, not fashionable: tall, slim, elegant. She wore simple things – dark pants, a T-shirt. There was a little bit of the hippy about her, too. She had a beautiful house on New York's Upper West Side and another in Mexico, and they were shabby-beautiful. She lived in her own world a little bit and you had to meet her there. She never said too much about what she was going to do when you commissioned her, but it was always her.

People assumed from her name that she was French, but she wasn't. (She was born in Massachusetts.) I didn't know much about her personal life. I know she had relationships and that she never married, but she was very private. Very few people knew about her life, and that is how she wanted it. She was friendly, but in a very selective way. Everyone who worked with her loved her because she was so sweet and so passionate.

Deborah was quite independent and liked to be a little mysterious. She loved Russia, the old Russia, and spent a lot of time in St Petersburg. I think, though I may be wrong, that she was a former model, but she was not of the trendy world of fashion. In fact, she was the opposite. She did not follow; she did her own thing. She never called herself an artist and when others did, she would say: "I'm a photographer."

For me, though, she was an artist. She led a kind of revolution in fashion photography with her early work, with the atmosphere and locations, but she was not a fashion photographer. The term is too confining for what she did. She made these beautiful books about places and buildings, like her Versailles book (Unseen Versailles), but I do think her fashion photographs worked against her in the art world. She was always somehow in the middle – between the worlds of art and fashion. She never really fitted into either.

It was great that Valentino used her in his campaigns until about two years ago. I was so glad about that. And a few days before she died, we agreed to do a book together around her pictures of the great aristocratic Italian families. It is a beautiful and sad thing to be doing now that she is not here, but I am very happy and proud to be doing it. For me, she is among the greatest photographers. She could have done so much more, but she was not prepared to compromise. That is the way of the true artist.

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