The Natural

There’s a disparity between looking at an object with the eye and looking at an object through a lens. Detail is put into focus. Minutiae is magnified. Color is saturated. Similar to the wondrous confusion of looking at a word for too long — each letter becoming its own entity, the word seen fresh when taken apart — a photographer enjoys the mysterious excitement of making what is commonplace appear new. 

Nikhil DePalma ’24 began enrolling in Taylor Dabney’s photography classes with the intention of looking at familiar objects in a new way. “I used to do a lot of videography for YouTube, and so I started taking photography classes with Mr. Dabney because of the digital media aspect,” he explains. His YouTube channel features clean, well-edited fishing videos of he and his friends casting off into bodies of water around Richmond, often flashing an added flare to the footage with aerial drone shots. Looking to explore his enthusiasm for digital media further, Nikhil saw Dabney’s photography classes as a logical progression in his studies. 

The dexterity of his videography translated easily to his photography. He manipulates the camera with calculated aplomb learned from lifelong immersion in media. The intense variety of his images display the variations of his imagination and creativity. Continuing to play with his drone’s camera, his photography lends new perspectives to patterns in nature. An aerial shot of a train track breaking through a forest shows a stark representation of industry tearing through previously untouched environments. “I just like getting a new perspective on things that you don’t normally get to see,” Nikhil explains of his approach to drone photography, delivered with the casual levity of a natural. “I think that’s really exciting. Photography, especially aerial photography, lets you see the different patterns nature makes.”

Dabney introduced various styles of photography to Nikhil— abstract, thematic, portraits — with the intention of honing his skill, developing a specific interest, and refining raw talent. When Dabney assigned portraits, Nikhil took a creative route. His way of seeing, through the lens, distorts subjects, makes the mundane seem foreign. A student’s face, captured in the reflection of water in a mug, makes the viewer’s eye, like the head caught in water, swim in a stew of sensations. In many of his images, the mind has to catch up to the eye in order to register what it’s seeing. But Nikhil explains the process behind the dizzying results easily: “I just stumble upon ideas, really. I knew that water would mirror my friend’s face, and I thought that would make for a neat photo.”

Other images make the pictorial space shallow. Typically an ancillary accessory, shadow, in one of Nikhil’s images, becomes the dominating force. His photographs blend a strange, cold glamor with a look-what-Ican-do dramatic fabrication. In another image, where he was tasked with animating something inanimate, he manipulated toilet paper around the head of a mannequin, giving it deep set eyes and an eerie, pale orange glow by playing with light and shadow. The face throbs over a black background, bulging from nothing. His originality, his talent, flashes in every photo. It results from an encouragement to simply try new approaches, he says, and from a need to entertain himself. “Mr. Dabney will give us a prompt but still gives us enough freedom to play around,” he says. “I think that creative freedom is really important. His guidance and that freedom have allowed me to find what I like in photography.” 

His development as a photographer has come from loose direction, similar to the way one shapes clay — never forcing the figure to take shape but rather guiding it on its path of maturation. His natural ability with a camera was always there; he just needed time to develop. “I like photography and videography a lot,” he says. “And I’ve learned that I have a different perspective on things, and I’ve learned how to develop that perspective through class.”