Personalities in Focus

Look at any of Taylor Dabney’s photographs and you feel as though you’re talking to the subject. Each image operates as a conversation held between viewer and sitter, a kind of meeting ground where a stranger can recognize another stranger. You look at a photo and connect with a life breathing within the frame. “What excites me about photography is that it allows me to meet people and tell their stories,” says Dabney, who has been teaching photography courses at Collegiate for the last 20 years. “My work is to form a relationship with someone and then make a picture of them that says something about them.” 

Dabney arrived on North Mooreland Road circuitously. Studying at the Pratt Institute, in New York, where he received his BFA, he picked up jobs around the city working for audiovisual companies. He came to Richmond via a job at The Valentine shooting photography catalogs, slideshows and films. With an insatiable interest in others, he has always stumbled into his next job by way of connecting with people. Once in Richmond, he quickly began working as the chief photographer for Richmond Lifestyle magazine, and, shortly after that, in 1986, he received the Virginia Commission for the Arts Photography Fellowship. The following year he was selected as one of the Top Five New Photographers at Photography’s Annual Awards in New York City. In the social network of his work, Dabney connected with the former visual arts department chair Alice Massie ’79 through his gigs at The Valentine. Massie asked him if he had any interest in teaching at Collegiate, and he’s been teaching students what he calls visual competency ever since.

“In whatever work I do, I make connections with people,” he says. “And so I’ve been lucky enough to have this running joke that I’ve never looked for a job. Instead, through the people I’ve met, I’ve made my job.” Listening to him speak about his photography, you begin to understand how he draws the personality out of his subjects. He speaks with a sedate, excited chatter, like a late night radio host eager to tell you about the next song on the queue. He has made his way by reducing the space that exists between two people, the camera his magical medium.

In the early 90s, working with a number of community agencies and art centers, Dabney visited teenage mothers and photographed them in their homes. The images, like so many photographs in his oeuvre, visit unsentimental dignity on figures that rarely receive such courtesy. In one photo in his “A Portrait of Teenage Mothers” series, a couple, sitting on a couch with a baby between them, balance this living uncertainty on their knees. Each parent places a hand on the baby’s naked stomach, and their faces wear a precarious confidence, a thin, fragile smile. We, the viewers, with the assistance of Dabney’s framework, sit across from them in their living room. We look around them and pick up on pieces of their natural lives — clothes beside them on the worn plaid couch, wood veneer walls sparsely decorated, a guitar case, a poster of a bald eagle — in the sharp but shallow way of a first encounter, fragments of information congealing around comprehension and understanding. 

In all of his portraits, Dabney’s intention is to invite understanding. For another project, he partnered with the writer and oral historian Anne Radford Phillips, Ph.D, to document the lives of tobacco farm women in Stokes County, North Carolina. The photos, compiled in the catalog “Voices and Reflections of Tobacco Farm Women: Field, Home and Family,” show the women’s mastery over the land and the toll it takes on the body to assume that mastery. The women pose in fields, in kitchens, in sheds and on porches. Their relationship to the land they tend is expressed primarily through their bodies — the clothes they wear, their posture, the tools they pose with. “The photos help explain what it’s like to be a farm woman to an urban population,” Dabney says. “They connect you to these women.” 

 

His pictures, often in black and white to elevate detail but remove the distraction introduced by color, are vigorous in the way a handshake can be vigorous, a common gesture that can hold an abundance of meaning. In his classes at Collegiate, he tries nourishing that same kind of vigor in his students. Dabney introduces various styles of photography to students — abstract, thematic, portraits — with the hopes of honing their skills and developing a specific interest. “My intention is to teach students visual literacy, to help them understand how a photograph works, how it can be manipulated and how to frame a story,” he says.

With any photograph, the first step is to understand the moment, the subject, in front of you before you raise your lens to your eye. It’s what Dabney has been doing throughout his career, and, with his students, he’s trying to train a similarly keen eye, a careful and bountiful vision. “You want to tell a story inside that little rectangle,” he says, “but to tell that story correctly you need to know how to frame and capture it.” 

Editor’s Note: Appearing first in the spring 2024 Spark, this piece is part of a feature series on Upper School visual art teachers who themselves are practicing artists.