Yet even though Turbeville painstakingly conveys Alix’s footsteps echoing in barren corridors (“they have an eccentric sound.

The moods of various scenes are exquisitely evoked. Rooms are portrayed with the precision expected from a photographer known for her atmospheric use of architectural spaces. (Her Paris studio “was an opulently decrepit, near-vacant flat near the drag bars of Pigalle,” wrote Judith Thurman in the New Yorker interview in the New York Times, Margalit Fox described Turbeville’s New York apartment, in the Ansonia, as a place where the photographer “left generations of old paint unstripped, speckled mirrors unsilvered, threadbare tapestry unrestored and tattered curtains unmended.”) Turbeville’s writing is sensory and impressionistic, tinged with a cinematic flair and slightly reminiscent of Marguerite Duras. Photographed in France, Italy, Poland, the United States, and the Czech Republic, the images display Turbeville’s appreciation for decadence and decay. The photo-novella reveals a strange and beautiful world. Photographs she took just two decades ago look as if they were from another century, unearthed in a Paris flea market. She was fond of distorting the images, playing with the developing process to create an artificial patina of time, and distressing the prints with tears, folds, and scratches. Beauty was, in Turbeville’s imagination, not just bright and happy but melancholic and brimming with travesty.

Lanky models with haunted eyes stand despairingly in abandoned settings. Turbeville’s vast body of work, which spans several decades and was published in the pages of various fashion magazines and books, as well as exhibited in museums and galleries across the world, is known for its darkness and mystery.

“I just stopped going.” When she was in her mid-thirties, she took a photography seminar with Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel, impressing her teachers with her strong point of view, despite her lack of skill or technique. “I’d get a note from some senior fashion editor saying, ‘We find your arrival half an hour late for Bill Blass appalling,’” Turbeville explained in a 1993 interview. “I’m not really a fashion photographer.” Turbeville, who was born in 1932, first entered the industry as an assistant and sample model to the fashion designer Claire McCardell before becoming a magazine editor-a job for which she had contempt. “Fashion takes itself more seriously than I do,” said Deborah Turbeville in an interview with The New Yorker in 2011.

Deborah turbeville fashion photography