pdf 1 - exhibitions international

SCANDAL
In the same May 1975
issue that carried Newton’s
photos from Saint-Tropez,
another fashion shoot
touched off readers’ anger,
and certain states even
banned the sale of the issue.
The pictures were taken
by Turbeville in a public bathhouse
in New York. Many
saw the five models as
portraying a lesbian scene.
DEBORAH TURBEVILLE:
EROTICISM WITH
WOMAN’S EYES
Newton’s fashion shoot in Saint-Tropez
was published, perhaps by coincidence,
in the same May 1975 issue
as another piece that scandalized
many readers. The photographer was
Deborah Turbeville, an American who
had been by turns a model and assistant
to designer Claire McCardell,
then a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar
and Mademoiselle. She had become
a photographer after participating in a
seminar held by Richard Avedon and
art director Marvin Israel, and had just
been brought to Vogue by Alexander
Liberman. The offending spread,
ten pages on bathing suits, was her
debut in the magazine. The sitting
depicted five slim girls in beach attire
against the stark, spartan background
of a disused bathhouse on Thirtythird
Street in New York. In the most
controversial of the photographs one
of the models, the one closest to the
camera, seems to be masturbating.
Turbeville recalls in On the Edge:
“When we made the prints I knew
that they were spectacular, and then I
heard that Mr. Liberman thought they
were extraordinary and that they were
getting these huge spreads. When
the magazine came out there was an
explosion, because of what Helmut
had done too. People began talking
about the pictures being immoral, and
saying was it Auschwitz or a lesbian
scene or an orgy. Or were they in an
insane asylum. But if you start out trying
to do an insane asylum or a lesbian
scene or an orgy it looks fake. It
is only when you don’t set out to do it
that things come off.”
Liberman, who played a leading
role in the magazine’s sensual
approach to fashion, was an ardent
defender of “porno-chic” as produced
by Turbeville and Newton. However,
Turbeville tried to differentiate her
style, vision of women, and eroticism
from those of male photographers.
“I am totally different from photographers
like Newton and Bourdin,” she
is quoted as saying in Polly Devlin’s
Vogue Book of Fashion Photography:
The First Sixty Years. “Their exciting
and brilliant photographs put women
down. They look pushed around in
a hard way, totally vulnerable. For
me there is no sensitivity in that. I
don’t feel the same way about eroticism
and women. Women should
be vulnerable and emotional; they can
be insecure and alone; but it is the
psychological tone and the mood that
I work for.”
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