blue
stocking
casa no name You never know what
time it is in the photographs of Deborah Turbeville.
While the conventional logic of the camera is to
capture a thin slice of the present and freeze it forever,
Turbeville labors to drag time out, making it thick
and slow through soft, langorous exposures and
negatives that are often scratched or dusty. Published
by Rizzoli,
Casa No Name
’s haunting collection of
photographs portrays Turbeville’s own dwelling in
Mexico and the strange and mystical objects that
inhabit it. Pages of drifting prose interleave the
images, offering a narration of Turbeville’s excursions
to Guatemala and her discovery of the people,
places, and artifacts that populate her photographs.
A heavy closeness hangs over nearly every image,
pressing in on Turbeville’s subjects and pushing
them up against the surface. Bleary bulbs and slowly
flickering candles illuminate the interiors of her house
and the shops and shrines she frequents. A frescoed
patio is almost secretly sealed inside the building,
punctured by doors and stairways leading back inside,
and her beds are shrouded with tapestries and fenced
in by posts and rails. Birds live in wire cages, and dogs
sit almost pensively, surrounded by wicker and potted
flowers. Even the outside world takes on a feeling of
enclosure, as Turbeville records the roofless ruins
of colonial estates and the battered walls of village
squares.
In all these pictures, time stretches out across
hours, years, or centuries, reaching not towards an
eternal sunlit paradise but towards something darker.
Melancholy fills the corners of densely furnished
rooms. Harsh experience marks the faces of young
girls. Sadness rests its burden on statues of the Virgin
Mary. Turbeville finds beauty in it all, ending her book
with a passage from
The Tempest
depicting life as “an
insubstantial pageant” destined to melt into the air.
The faces and spaces in her book are, like everything,
beginning to fade, but they are stunningly replete with
substance n
Ellen Lupton~Casa No Name, Deborah
Turbeville, hardcover, Rizzoli rizzoliusa.com
apr + may 2009
Cover
IFC
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