Instead, she worked as a model and assistant to Claire McCardell – the fashion designer who brought wool jersey and denim to the catwalk. A ‘tall, gangly girl’, she arrived in New York at 19, with dreams of a stage career. She has photographed her own house in Mexico as if she were a slightly drunk time-travelling visitor in her own intimate landscape, exploring and contemplating her rooms and their objects – tin retablos, wooden boxes, a painted carving of the Virgin Saint Maria Candelaria. Foggy Venice, the gardens at Cliveden gardens (where the Profumo scandal of the 1960s took flight), a palazzo in Mantua (where Bertolucci shot his baroque communist epic 1900).

It’s a quite un-American world, a view through the rear window, fascinated by the beaten, worn and forgotten. ‘Obliterate it a little so you never have it completely there.’ ‘I destroy the image after I’ve made it,’ said Turbeville. Consciously damaged goods, they are blurry, grainy, tormented into painterly colours, scratched, marked, sellotaped – post-production work often done with her long-term assistant and collaborator Sharon Schuster. Her pictures are as much riddles as they are images. Even more than those two louche Europeans, she injected narrative and mystery into what is, after all, an unabashedly commercial process.

Like her near contemporaries, Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, she rethought and recast fashion photography in the 1970s. Her fashion work, she says, is always done ‘with tongue in cheek’. The uneasy shuffle of ambiguity is the essence of Turbeville and her work – which itself shuffles between fashion magazine and art gallery, never fully at peace in either place. Yet her mother described her as a ‘shy and scary child’. Her early life was comfortable – she went to private school. Her pictures are dream-like states, in love with doubt and confusion.

‘They draw me out more than anything.’ Nostalgia is her defining emotional state. ‘Since then I have always had to have mystery and atmosphere in my life,’ she has said of Ogunquit. There is more than a suggestion in her work and life that the family summer home in this New England seaside town is her Rosebud. ‘Very bleak, very stark, very beautiful,’ was Turbeville’s description of it. ‘Beautiful Place by the Sea’ is the oceanside township’s motto. Deborah Turbeville was born in 1938, in Boston.

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