The World of Interiors

SOME TIME in 1984 the fashion photographer
Deborah Turbeville made the long journey from New York to
San Miguel de Allende a former Spanish colonial town some
300km north of Mexico City. She was flying down to take a closer
look at a house she had glimpsed after a fashion shoot amid the
town’s Baroque architecture and which might now be for sale.
In Rome she had just photographed Cy Twombly and the col-
ours of the painter’s house led her to consider creating her own.
As a photographer Turbeville would invariably place her
models in a mise en scène of derelict buildings. Then she would
distress the results to further remove them from any precise time
or place relocating them in a world of her own imagining. This
crumbling house in a town with history might allow her to do the
same and she acquired it on the spot. ‘It was like some ugly child
of mine’ she said later ‘that I coaxed into line to make beautiful.’
‘It was horrible like a suburban house complete with avocado-
coloured refrigerator’ recalled her close friend Barbara Peters. ‘But
the bones were there; it had perhaps been an old staging post
maybe 200 years old. It had so much potential...’ Turbeville fo-
cused on the half-ruined balcony; on the Moorish arches and pil-
lars along the patio; and on the faded frescoes of biblical scenes.
Two imposing doors led from the street into a covered reception
area and then into a courtyard. It was an L-shaped house with a liv-
ing room a large kitchen and a walk outside to the main bedroom.
There were four further bedrooms and a room for the ‘help’.
Upstairs one small bedroom faced the courtyard; behind it a lar-
ger room was used as a studio. The history of the house was unfath-
omable so Turbeville christened her new home Casa No Name.
‘In fact’ she wrote years later ‘it was a small casa that carried
on inside like a village.’ At the back next to the staircase that led
to the roof a bougainvillea tree climbed the wall like a giant un-
furling umbrella. Its village-y feel was down in no small part to
her own design for living. ‘The atmosphere was usually placid’
says Peters‘but then out of nowhere it would be punctuated by

blaring music so that it felt like an opera house. Deborah created

her own world and lived completely within it.’

She filled the house with birdcages statues wood carvings

plaster saints wickerwork broken dolls crucifixes and tin can-

dlesticks. It took her two years to renovate though the friend over-

seeing told the builders not to make too perfect a job of it for ‘The

señora likes it that way.’ It was in fact as much a deconstruction

as a restoration. ‘I wanted a return to a beautiful ruin’ explained

Turbeville ‘a rehearsal for something that would never take place.’

The faded splendour of the nearby Hacienda Jaral de Berrio (WoI

Aug 2009) was an immediate source of inspiration.

Atmosphere was fundamental to Turbeville. It marked out her

photographs like nothing else. She told one interviewer from Vogue

that she enjoyed not belonging ‘to any place or group and the same

thing could be applied to my personal life. And it’s true of time too.

I don’t want to belong completely to the present. There are things

I love about the past. Atmosphere – I crave it the way some people

crave food or sex.’ This reached a photographic apogee in Unseen

Versailles (1981) a book of spectral behind-the-scenes vignettes

of Louis XIV’s pleasure-dome and Deborah Turbeville’s Newport

Remembered (1994) in which the Gilded Age mansions of Rhode

Island are revealed in all their desiccated grandeur.

Born into Bostonian wealth Turbeville had been briefly a

model then an assistant (and house model) to sportswear de-

signer Claire McCardell which she followed with stints as a styl-

ist and editor at Harpers’ Bazaar and Mademoiselle. After attending

a workshop led by Richard Avedon she realised that making

fashion photographs was her destiny. Not the bright sporty

happy outdoorsy ones that were then in demand but dark

brooding and painterly ones which were not.

Though she was all but self-taught Turbeville’s career would

last 35 years. At Vogue she made an impact with a set of pictures

that remain her most famous and a landmark of 20th-century

fashion photography. ‘Do something remarkable dear. I’m ex-

pecting it!’ admonished Alexander Liberman the magazine’s edi-

torial director one day in 1975. In a dimly lit turn-of-the-century

bathhouse on 23rd Street she did just that. Five models posed

languidly across the gloomy tiled walls in an eerie subaqueous

light. ‘I always quiet everyone down during a sitting and there was

not even a breath’ explained Turbeville. ‘And everyone got really

tense and was moving in this synchronised way... They moved

like puppets. And when it was over there was dead silence.’

Though not when Vogue came out. There were howls of protest.

Pale and unsmiling the women looked disengaged if not trapped.

Fashion editor Polly Mellen recalled: ‘The [pictures] shocked every-

one. You can’t imagine what people saw in them – everything from

prisoners in a gas chamber to addicts in a shooting gallery.’

Turbeville’s life was nomadic and although she had close

friends she was by many accounts self-contained. She was used to

shuttling back and forth between the fashion capitals of New York

Milan Paris and London. An apartment in the Beaux-Arts land-

mark the Ansonia on New York’s Upper West Side was as near to

home as she would allow but here she kept the colours muted and

the curtains drawn. ‘She didn’t like New York light unlike the light

of Mexico’ says Barbara Peters. ‘She lived for her aesthetics. I told

her if she didn’t get a comfortable chair I’d never come back.’

Casa No Name seldom made a good location for her fashion

work; perhaps because the long journey to Mexico from wherev-

er she had been working was itself an exhausting creative pro-

cess; perhaps because at last Deborah Turbeville as mercurial

and unknowable as her photographs had finally come home $