Most Popular Books by Deborah Turbeville

The intense fascination with the golden age of Newport, Rhode Island, where the wealthy families of turn-of-the-century America built enormous mansions and socialized for the summer, has never been stronger. In this evocative new book, a distinguished writer and a renowned photographer collaborate to give us a unique vision of that gilded past. Deborah Turbeville''s stunning photographs convey the glory and the mystery of some of the great estates, inside and out. Adding an historical angle, Louis Auchincloss gives keen and witty observations of society, its leaders and architects, and social customs of the period.

''Casa No Name'' is Deborah Turbeville''sphotographic essay of her hauntingly beautiful house located in the central highlands of Mexico.

In her previous books on Versailles and Newport, photographer Deborah Turbeville has succeeded in brilliantly evoking the moods, auras, ghosts, and allure of each place''s past glories. Now, in her new book, she turns to the fabled capital of imperial Russia and its dark successor, Leningrad. Based on repeated visits to St. Petersburg over the last two years, Studio St. Petersburg is a passionate and highly personal exploration of the Russian people and their turbulent history. In haunting, dreamlike images of grand and extravagant Czarist palaces (many in ruins), churches, and other buildings, as well as the faces and figures of the Russian people -- ballerinas, actors, officials, and workers, pictured both in tightly cropped closeups and orchestrated scenes -- Turbeville creates a powerful, intuitive portrait of St. Petersburg. With brief texts drawn from the memoirs of artists and writers who experienced both Czarist and Communist rule, Studio St. Petersburg brilliantly summons up the lost world of imperial St. Petersburg and the embattled, brilliant culture of the Soviet era.

Past Imperfect encompasses Deborah Turbevilles ground breaking imagery created between 1974 and 1998. This is the work that the photographer herself puts in italics the narrative work which stands at the very center of her oeuvre. The photographs themselves, with their tension and sense of hidden melodrama, weave together the disparate novellas running through the book. Many of the images, often iconic, are recycled from the unlikely medium of fashion photography, both published and un-published. Some fifteen vignettes capture her unique sensibility and elegant aesthetic. Each vignette is a series of stills, reminding one of films they missed but would have liked to have seen (to quote one critic). It is an unorthodox vision, at once haunting and memorable. The characters (mostly women) interact with their strange, elusive environments as anachronisms; misplaced, out of sync with their time and context. A group of Turbevilles favorite actresses and models (mostly unknown) act as a repertoire cast who interpret these endangered species. Mutations in a mannequin workshop, statues in a Paris art school, automatons in a derelict factory. They reveal inner thoughts, emotions, and a sense of unease. There is a sense of fragmented dreams, dislocation, hallucination, a time without boundaries ongoing the past imperfect.