

Turbeville’s early career as a fashion photographer depended precisely on a degree of suggestive blur (first spotted by Richard Avedon) that rendered her subjects – not to say the clothes that were the ostensible pretext for the pictures – so many excuses for conjuring an alluring haze.

Her most abiding images, the ‘Bath House’ series, produced for Vogue in 1975 (and reprised in the similar ‘Steam Room’ photographs of 1984), present models whose misty lassitude is the antithesis of Newton’s athletic automata. Deborah Turbeville, you might say, is the anti-Helmut Newton.
