Unquiet
Things

I have long been familiar with the haunting romanticism of Deborah Turbeville’s fashion photography, often losing myself in their eerie atmospheres and spectral moods – elegant ghost stories and hazy hallucinations of antique decadence, beloved and perfect, all.

However, I had never seen until tonight her 1981 series Unseen Versailles. In the late 1970s, while living in Paris, Turbeville discovered the Château de Versailles. Initially refused access for a fashion shoot, she was granted permission to photograph the estate during its renovation, thanks to her admirer and friend, Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Turbeville spent a whole winter there, presenting her work in the book Unseen Versailles in 1981.

This project came at a pivotal moment in the château’s history. In 1979, the same year Versailles was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the palace closed for extensive renovations. This timing allowed Turbeville unprecedented access to a dormant Versailles, far removed from its status as one of France’s most popular tourist attractions.

Rather than showcase the polished grandeur typically associated with Versailles, Turbeville sought out its hidden facets: neglected storage rooms, ghostly private chambers shrouded in dust cloths, and halls filled with broken statuary. She scattered autumn leaves on floors to emphasize abandonment and neglect. The result is a haunting vision of this excessive place, a ghostly evocation of memory and melancholic magic in long-waiting derelict, dust-shrouded twilight chambers.

Turbeville’s lens captured not just empty rooms, but a landscape of forgotten objects – hairpins, papers, shoes, masks – all given equal narrative weight. As she wrote in her book’s preface, these items became “fleeting witnesses” to the palace’s past, so delicate that “an open window might blow them all away.” This approach aligned with Jackie Kennedy’s vision: to evoke the feeling that Versailles was inhabited by “ghosts and memories,” offering viewers a uniquely intimate and melancholic perspective on this historic space.

These images, at once evocative and unsettling, embody Turbeville’s distinct, intensely personal vision. Her photographs create a charged atmosphere of mystery and ambiguity, projecting a sense of isolation and romanticism frozen in time. By combining elements of architecture and décor, Turbeville constructs a dream world where the gilded beauty of 18th-century rooms coexists with decay and dereliction. This cinematic approach transforms Versailles into a backdrop for untold stories, inviting viewers to lose themselves in a hauntingly beautiful, timeless realm between reality and imagination.

In “Unseen Versailles,” Turbeville’s photographs show the gilded beauty of the 18th-century rooms while evoking the complex history of this magnificent palace, built by Louis XIV to consolidate the aristocracy under his roof. Her sophisticated and intellectual work often featured gardens and architecture as backdrops to cinematic evocations of untold stories, set in dream worlds of castles and gardens, often decayed and derelict, timeless and unreal.

Turbeville’s work in “Unseen Versailles” continues to captivate, offering a timeless exploration of beauty, decay, and the lingering echoes of history. Her ability to transform the familiar into something hauntingly unfamiliar invites us to see Versailles – and perhaps all spaces rich with history – through a new, more contemplative lens. In doing so, she reveals the poetic power of abandonment and the enduring allure of faded grandeur.

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