The massive image: the otherworldly scenes of the nice Deborah Turbeville

Deborah Turbeville’s pictures first appeared in Vogue in 1975, when she was already 42. Her singular, intimate model – her fashions, it was famous, all the time appeared “locked of their solitude”, oblivious to the digital camera – was subsequently a fixture in trend magazines till her demise in 2013. This picture from 1985 options the fashions Anh Duong and Marie-Sophie sporting the garments of Emanuel Ungaro, however that doesn’t clarify the half of it. Turbeville, characteristically, seems to have chanced upon a scene of impossibly dusty decadence. Her two otherworldly figures are set in dreamlike relation to one another. Marie-Sophie sits staring into the previous like a nude by Ingres, whereas Duong faces glassily ahead, apparently considering visions, her arm hanging over the sting of the shrouded chaise, in limp homage to Jacques Louis-David’s The Loss of life of Marat.

Turbeville, who was American, was drawn to ancien-regime Europe. She had three years earlier been granted permission to create a photographic portrait of the palace of Versailles, and her architectural photos dwelled on uncared for marble in empty courtyards. That temper of misplaced splendour inflected a lot of her work; she appreciated to say that she all the time “wished to listen to a clock ticking” in her photos. A brand new e book inspecting her adventures in photograph collage, which incorporates this picture, unpicks her “haunted neoclassicism” and her reward for making evocative narratives of single photographs. Checked out collectively her photos discover a language for the longings to which all trend imagery aspires: stills from seize-the-day life.

In speaking about her model, Turbeville generally referenced the influence of early and Nouvelle Obscure cinema on her concepts for scenes. This image was a literal homage to that affect. The {photograph} was taken on the Chateau de Raray, 30 miles north of Paris, which had been the low-lit setting for Jean Cocteau’s 1946 reimagining of Magnificence and the Beast.

• Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage by Nathalie Herschdorfer will probably be printed by Thames & Hudson on 12 October (£55). To help The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Supply prices might apply