The Male Gaze of Female Photographers
Gender Posing in Deborah Turbeville’s 1975 Vogue Editorial
In 1975, Deborah Turbeville’s fashion editorial “There’s More to a Bathing Suit Than Meets the Eye”, or “Bathhouse” for short, appeared in the American Vogue, marking her breakthrough. Two years later, The New York Times described the rising star as
the only American photographer in the triumvirate that has changed the direction of selling clothes from pleasant images to eeriness, shock and alienation. The other two are men who live in France, Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton. Her work is more romantic than that of her male colleagues, who have been described as producing erotic fantasies that flirt with danger. (Taylor 27)
It is rather ironic that even during the decade of the second wave feminism, the only way to make sense of Turbeville’s approach to fashion photography — a field traditionally dominated by men (Aspers 40) — was to juxtapose her work with that of her male counterparts. Based alone on the fact that Turbeville was a woman, critics seem to automatically classify her work as “romantic” (Taylor 27) and “delicate” (Cochrane) — in other words, as distinctly but also stereotypically feminine.
As Laura Mulvey, a feminist theorist, described in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”…
