The remarkable archive of Deborah Turbeville – one of the few female photographers working for fashion magazines along Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin – includes a multitude of unseen photographs, collages and ephemera. Spending time reworking her prints, Turbeville created over four decades unique objects that have been triturated, manipulated, torn, glued together. The American artist began making collages in the late 1970s, playing with images and negatives, xeroxing, cutting, scraping and taping, pinning the prints together, writing words in the margins, thus giving her work a very unique touch. Never seen before, MUUS reveals at Paris Photo ‘Passport’ – a body of work from the 1990s that can be seen today as the artist’s biography. In this series that includes120 collages with texts, Turbeville proposed a narrative sequence that is very cinematographic. Her unique signature style is recognizable in ‘Passport’: a certain timelessness, melancholy, and patina emanate from these hauntingly beautiful photographs. With her incomparable vision, Turbeville can not be confined to fashion photography. Offering a new insight into her work, the MUUS Collection generates new scholarship and understanding of 20th century photography.
