Some photographers chase perfection.
Colin Dodgson courts something stranger.
Born under the cinematic skies of Southern California, Dodgson has made a name for himself not through slick precision, but through a love affair with imperfection. His work—whether in Vogue, Dazed, or an obscure train window somewhere in the Peruvian highlands—feels less like photography and more like lucid dreaming. Think: warm light, offbeat timing, and subjects caught mid-thought, mid-movement, mid-exhale.
At a glance, it’s beautiful. On closer inspection, it’s a bit weird. Which is precisely the point.
THE ANALOG ALCHEMIST
In a world obsessed with digital sheen, Dodgson is defiantly analog. He doesn’t just shoot on film—he prints in the darkroom, by hand, with all the glorious unpredictability that entails. “When I take pictures,” he says, “I collect things.” Not just objects—rocks, trash, vegetables—but moments. Fleeting, messy, loaded moments. He invites the dust, the scratch, the unexpected blur. That’s where the magic lives.
It’s this painterly touch that has seduced some of fashion’s most visually literate houses: Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Marni. They come not for polish, but for soul. For narrative. For the split-second stories Dodgson sneaks into every frame.
ABSURDITY, BUT MAKE IT ART
There’s always a wink in his work. A joke half-told. A surreal detail that feels like an inside reference to life’s quiet chaos. A potato can become a religious relic. A roadside juice pouch, a sacred still life. His lens teases out the oddities most of us overlook.
Yet there’s empathy too. In Safety, Service and Security (2018), his lens turned inward, examining existential doubt amid California suburbia. In Ciento por Ciento (2022), he went global—documenting environmental conservation in Patagonia with a reverence that didn’t preach, but instead simply showed. Real places, real people, real stakes. Rendered in tones that felt touched by moonlight.
ON THE RAILS, OFF THE MAP
His latest journey—I Lost My Train of Thought—is equal parts travelogue and tone poem, composed while drifting across the Andes aboard Belmond’s high-altitude sleeper train. The photos read like fragments from a fever dream: passengers caught in golden light, market stalls erupting with color and entropy, potatoes that look like ancient sculpture.
It’s less about destination, more about sensation. Less “where,” more “how it felt to be there.” And that’s the Dodgson formula: art that doesn’t shout, but haunts. Images that don’t demand attention, but reward it.
Colin Dodgson doesn’t take pictures. He conjures moments.
Sometimes absurd. Sometimes poetic. Always unmistakably his.
