Wallflower

>> "My pictures walk a tightrope.  They never know.  The photographs are like the women you see in them.  A little out of balance with their surroundings, waiting anxiously for the right person to find the, and thinking that perhaps they are out of their time.  They move forward clutching their past about them, as if the ground of the present may fall away.  Their exeriors seem walled up and introverted; the interiors endless… airless.  The very print wuality reflects something in the women that is hesitant, a little faded and scratched; or that, having emerged into a light too harsh, stand frozen in space, overexposed."

"It is interesting to me that the definition of the rather old-fashioned word Wallflower is: a pale yellow or brownish-red flower that clings, wild, to the sides of walls – and someone who choose not to, or is not chosen to, dance; a spectator."  

Deborah Turbeville, 1978

I was trying to root around for this "Wallflower" monograph book by Deborah Turbeville, when she passed away a few weeks ago.  Now that I'm packing up all my belongings into boxes, I found it lodged behind two other heftier and brassier fashion tomes, much like its clinging but unassuming namesake flower.  I'm afraid that I'm just here to proffer up a selection of images from this beautiful book as renovating new Casa Bubble is slowly taking over my life.  Still, no pithy words of mine could do justice to Turbeville's delicately nuanced photographs.  Best to defer to Turbeville's words above.