Colin Dodgson’s Andean Odyssey Headlines the Third Year of a Creative Alliance—and a Call for the Next Great Eye
There’s something about train travel that awakens a certain kind of mind: the type that lingers on shadows, that savors detail, that listens for silence between moments. That might explain why Belmond—purveyors of the world’s most refined slow travel experiences—have returned to Photo London (15–18 May 2025) for the third consecutive year as Presenting Partner, this time with a new visual journey by American photographer Colin Dodgson.
His solo show, titled I Lost My Train of Thought, is far from a cliché postcard from Peru. It’s a dreamscape of flickering light, indigenous textures, and surreal stillness—all captured from the windows of the Andean Explorer, Belmond’s high-altitude sleeper train that drifts across the Andes like a mirage in motion.
Dodgson boarded the train for a four-day passage from Cusco to Arequipa, stopping at Lake Titicaca, the floating Uros islands, and the pre-Columbian Colca Canyon. The results are haunting, warm, and hand-printed—images that hover in the magic hour between memory and hallucination.
THE ART OF PAYING ATTENTION
Dodgson isn’t your average shutter-happy documentarian. Raised in Southern California with a surfer’s instinct for rhythm and drift, he brings a painter’s patience to photography. “When I take pictures, I collect things,” he says—plastic bottles, rocks, makeshift juice pouches. It’s less hoarding, more anthropology. This obsession with the ordinary leads to images that are anything but.
He’s as likely to shoot a deconstructed pop-up market on a railway track—complete with oranges, engine parts, and baby gear—as he is to focus on a gnarled Peruvian potato like it’s a Rembrandt subject. (Turns out, potatoes are native to Peru, and Dodgson treats them with appropriate reverence.) His inspirations include Dutch Golden Age still lifes and the poetry of imperfection. The work feels lived-in, like an old jazz record or a well-worn map.
