Dorie Dahlberg: “People I Once Knew”

One of the state's finest photographers resurrects images from the distant past.

Jill, with a toothpick, circa 1984

Maybe you’ve got a friend who won’t stop texting old photographs to you. I do. At any moment, I am one glance away from an uncomfortable saunter down Memory Lane. Gentle suggestions that he ought to reorient his attentions to the future haven’t deterred him. The shots of me at younger, spryer, healthier ages can be tough to take. But for sheer destabilization, they’ve got nothing on the pictures of acquaintances I once had but forgot about entirely, or the pictures of people I’ll never see again. Those can be a midday stomach punch: a reminder of the frailty of memory and the transience of all things.

A photograph, Def Leppard once told us, is not enough. It is not merely that they bring their subjects tantalizingly close to us but still beyond reach. It’s also that they provide us with an irrefutable record of how far time’s arrow has traveled. The better the photograph (and the better the photographer), the more poignant it is to be shown worlds that we once may have experienced, but are now unrecoverable to us. Old photos are, invariably, freighted with regret.

The bittersweet quality of the dusty photo album, left on the shelf in the den but infrequently consulted, pervades “People I Once Knew,” the latest solo show from the prolific Dorie Dahlberg. The Long Branch photographer snaps so many great new shots (they’re regularly posted to Instagram) that it’s a surprise she’s got any time or energy to dig through old ones.

Yet that’s what she’s done in her exhibition at Outliers (150 Bay St.). She’s unearthed fourteen negatives from the ‘70s and early ‘80s, and from them, she has made prints of portraits of friends who’ve dropped out of her life. Many Dahlberg shows foreground storytelling: in a 2024 photo exhibition at Casa Colombo, she challenged visitors to generate short narratives suggested by the photographs on view. “People I Once Knew” is full of novelistic and theatrical elements — a powerful sense of setting, period clothing and cars, scenery-chewing characters. For once, though, the emphasis isn’t about what the photos tell. It’s about what the photos don’t.

Dorie Dahlberg’s camera reveals plenty, though. Like a photojournalist (she’d have been an asset to any newsroom), she captures telling detail in luscious black and white. Dahlberg’s models do not look modern: they’ve got that raw, rough-hewn quality that people seemed to have a half century ago. Immediately, we get a sense they’re not going to fit comfortably into the days to come — our days, in other words. They lack the neoprene smoothness of twenty-first century subjects. Are these personalities too big to fit in the cramped, airless quarters of our times? Is this the reason that Dahlberg lost track of them?, did they simply not make it past the low-clearance sign on the speedway to 2025?

Jeff, on the beach in Brigantine

Because it could not be that Dahlberg wasn’t compelled by them. Her lens tells us otherwise. Her “People I Once Knew” are captured with a deep interest that often borders on carnality. They seem to belong to a sexier time. (Maybe they do.) In these early shots, she applies the sensuousness of her current Shore photography to human bodies. It’s there in the sworls of wet hair on the legs of “Jeff,” shirtless and on his haunches on the beach in Brigantine in 1984, hands clasped expectantly in front of him and an untamed look on his face. Just as we can practically smell the suntan oil on the gleaming skin of “Nancy,” photographed on the same strand, we can feel the grit of the hot sand between Jeff’s toes. It becomes a visual metaphor for the roughness and incipient danger that seems to await these “People,” and we suspect they know there’s trouble coming. 

Nancy, too, radiates sexuality and peril. We don’t see her face — she’s covered it with her shirt — and the ferocious reflection of the sun on a nearby notebook is reason enough for a beachgoer to shield her eyes. Everything Dahlberg shows us goes straight to character, including the air-baked languor with which she loosely grasps her cloth shield, the idle way she grasps at a handful of sand, the shadow of her wrist on her bikini top, another shadow of her elbow on her blanket, and the slight bow in her body as she raises her midriff to catch the rays. It’s all intensely sensual, a poem in contrast-y grayscale.

The young Dahlberg must have found these physical contours irresistible. Did Nancy burn to a crisp in Brigantine or disintegrate like a sandcastle? Or did her body erode under the slow press of days until it was unrecognizable?

These aren’t candid shots, but they certainly aren’t posed. Even as a young woman, she was a quick draw. Dahlberg notices something revealing — something worth preserving — and she commits her impression to film before the scene shifts. Sometimes total strangers get caught up in the negotiation between the lens and the day it captures. “Grace and Two Unknown Kids,” for instance, is a museum-quality version of a photobomb.

We see very little of Grace, ensconced in the carriage of an old gangster sedan in a grass parking lot, visible from the chin up, looking through the window with a mix of bemusement and claustrophobia. She’s utterly upstaged by an African-American youth in a collared shirt and fresh sneakers. He rests his arm on the side of the car, cocks his head, and flashes the camera a proprietary look. It’s his reflection we see on the side-view mirror and the black metal chassis. His leg is right where Grace’s should be. Another kid, probably his little brother, peers around the rear of the car; he’s skeptical, and he’s checking it out warily, suspicious of the camera and its demands. Perhaps he possesses the well-known humility of the younger siblings. Steal the shot if you must, make your presence felt, but realize where you’re headed: anonymity.

Then there are the Dahlberg photos that are simply so intimate that they seem to belong to a private moment. They chronicle a transient but inviolable bond between the photographer and the subject. We feel a bit voyeuristic checking these out, but they’re so lush, detailed, and skillfully composed that we can’t help but stare. “Johnny: Nantucket,” a gorgeous photograph, captures a man making a cup of Maxwell House on a vintage range. It is drenched in bleary morning-ness, but there’s a sense of determination to the shot, too. Dahlberg’s camera finds an association between the cottony steam from the coffee-maker and Johnny’s chest hair, a silver nimbus that surrounds his torso.

Even prettier is “Jill With Toothpick,” a portrait of a winsome young woman with her hair pulled back, sweatshirt partially unbuttoned, staring down in intense concentration at something on the counter we can’t see. Like Jeff, Jill seems to have reserves of strength and a certain unruliness that doesn’t fit in the era of convenience then dawning. It’s telling that both of these shots were taken in kitchens, those repositories of family secrets, places of ritual, and daily domestic intensity. 

En route to the outer limits of the solar system.

A slow morning in a kitchen seems like it could last forever. But of course nothing does: Jill, Johnny and the rest of them slip away from the camera and elude the frame, and pretty soon, they’re part of the fathomless past. Even though Dorie Dahlberg is quick to observe, she’s reluctant to chase. “Joe,” for instance, stands in a tight, soiled t-shirt in front of an industrial dumpster. His gloves are black with grease, and the veins in his muscular arms are bulging. But what’s most remarkable about this character is his face, and particularly his eyes: he is utterly exposed by the camera. He looks angry, astonished, caged by circumstance and ready to lash out. All this physical labor has not exhausted or tamed him. Instead, it’s revved him up and readied him to crash, elbows out, into the future. The picture catches him “before he hitchhiked to Saturn.” He looks like he did. Dorie Dahlberg did not follow. 

(Outliers Gallery is on the second floor of the arts complex at 150 Bay Street. When you leave the elevators, walk straight. Go past the two main galleries. You will see it. There's usually someone attending the gallery from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. on weekends.)