When I first came across the Durham Doll on Instagram (@thedurhamdoll), I thought the feed was cute, clever, charming. Then I met the woman behind it, Talya Klein, and I realized: It’s also very smart.
The social media account displays iPhone photos of a Blythe doll, named Dahlia, in various places around the Bull City. At Sarah P. Duke Gardens, Loaf, West Point on the Eno and The Durham Hotel rooftop.
Dahlia always looks adorable – and so does her dog, Bullington, who is named for the Bullington Warehouse – and the captions can be laugh-out- loud funny. For example, she posed in front of The Parlour with an ice cream cone, and the caption read: “It’s 70 degrees in December, so excuse me while I eat my weight in ice cream.” Keep in mind: She’s a foot tall.
But Dahlia is deeper than you might think. Talya is a professional film director. She went to Duke and once taught at the university, but just moved back from New York City in October. She wanted to nurture her love of photography, but didn’t have any willing subjects since she had moved far away from her young nieces. She started taking photos as she walked around Durham – being a New Yorker, urban exploration is a huge part of her day to day. But she thought selfies would get old to her friends. So would landscapes.
Why not put a doll in the photos? Talya carries the doll in her bag and heads to places she’s curious about. She ignores people staring while she poses Dahlia. Sometimes, she storyboards the doll’s week. Dahlia posing in front of the Civil Rights Mural downtown on Martin Luther King Jr. Day was no accident, after all.
Dahlia represents a certain kind of freedom to Talya. “We don’t get to see pictures of women by themselves, happy,” she says.
Talya switched out the doll’s blonde hair for dark, curly hair. “I thought it was important for her to be ethnically ambiguous,” she says. “Durham is such a diverse place.”
The Durham Doll has amassed more than 1,200 followers on Instagram since October. Clearly, fellow residents share Dahlia’s enthusiasm for Durham. “I’m floored at how it has taken off,” Talya says.
