Past Imperfect encompasses Deborah Turbeville’s 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 Turbeville’s 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.