That is the way of the true artist.She moves to New York in 1956, where Deborah becomes a sample model and assistant for Claire McCardell. She could have done so much more, but she was not prepared to compromise.

For me, she is among the greatest photographers. It is a beautiful and sad thing to be doing now that she is not here, but I am very happy and proud to be doing it. And a few days before she died, we agreed to do a book together around her pictures of the great aristocratic Italian families. It was great that Valentino used her in his campaigns until about two years ago. She was always somehow in the middle – between the worlds of art and fashion. She made these beautiful books about places and buildings, like her Versailles book ( Unseen Versailles), but I do think her fashion photographs worked against her in the art world. The term is too confining for what she did. She led a kind of revolution in fashion photography with her early work, with the atmosphere and locations, but she was not a fashion photographer. She never called herself an artist and when others did, she would say: 'I'm a photographer.'įor me, though, she was an artist. She did not follow she did her own thing. I think, though I may be wrong, that she was a former model, but she was not of the trendy world of fashion. She loved Russia, the old Russia, and spent a lot of time in St Petersburg. Everyone who worked with her loved her because she was so sweet and so passionate.ĭeborah was quite independent and liked to be a little mysterious. She was friendly, but in a very selective way. Very few people knew about her life, and that is how she wanted it.

I know she had relationships and that she never married, but she was very private. (She was born in Massachusetts.) I didn't know much about her personal life. People assumed from her name that she was French, but she wasn't. She never said too much about what she was going to do when you commissioned her, but it was always her. She lived in her own world a little bit and you had to meet her there. She had a beautiful house on New York's Upper West Side and another in Mexico, and they were shabby-beautiful. There was a little bit of the hippy about her, too. She wore simple things – dark pants, a T-shirt. She was stylish, not fashionable: tall, slim, elegant. I don't like this model.' She would complain for hours.ĭeborah was utterly individual, both in her work and her life. If she ended up on a shoot she didn't like, I have to say, you heard about it. Plus, she had to like what she was doing for the passion to be there. People in the fashion world like more commercial photographers and she never cared to become commercial. She knew Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton, but she did not get their recognition. Deborah never really had the recognition or the success she deserved.

Deborah turbeville valentino