Colin Dodgson: Encounters and Afterglow

Before he was a photographer, Colin Dodgson was a surfer. Born and raised in Oxnard, California, he spent all his time training in the ocean. Or, rather, he spent all the time that was allowed him, since surfing requires the cooperation of wind, waves and weather, tides and currents. This responsiveness stood Dodgson in good stead for his photography, which similarly requires the alignment of settings, whether atmospheric, physical or emotional. ‘My work is conditional’, he tells me. ‘I can’t just “switch it on”.’

Dodgson studied at a photography trade school, one of ‘the last generation who didn’t learn to do digital first’, and a commitment to analogue processes is part of his fine alchemy of image-making. As he explains, photographing on film means ‘you can’t shoot in very low-light situations; your day is done when it gets dark.’ Dodgson seems in particular to thrive in the flush of the late afternoon, when the deep, dying light sets his subjects aglow.

This preference is also a matter of psychology: toward the end of day, Dodgson explains, ‘normal things have happened: you’ve had lunch, you’ve seen friends. You are in a place mentally where you can make decisions that don’t feel rash.’ He talks about what he calls ‘beach brain’, and I imagine what it feels like heading into town after a long day by the ocean: blissed out and slightly befuddled, retinas a little bleached.

A gentle and pleasing bafflement, or curiosity. Dodgson’s subjects are often things made strange – here, an egg on the curb, the interior of a cool bag, an oceanic vista caught in a glass tumbler. He tells me about a trip to Japan, when ‘the light was really similar to that of coastal California’, but everything else – colour, pattern, architecture – was different. It was ‘like being an infant again, when you can’t really talk to anyone and are just visually taking it all in’, Dodgson says. One word for this state, I suggest, is wonder. I am reminded of some lines from Wallace Stevens’s ‘Tea at the Plaza of Hoon’ (1921): ‘What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? / What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? / What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?’

My work is conditional. I can’t just switch it on. Colin Dodgson

Personal journeys have remained important to Dodgson. In the books Deeper Green (2019) and Ciento por Ciento (2023), he documents trips through Belize and Patagonia with the World Land Trust. A recent commission saw him capture a ride from Singapore to Penang on Belmond’s Eastern & Oriental Express. He still moves regularly between Oxnard, New York and London. But the journey taken by objects animates him, too. He talks about his fascination with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Dutch golden age still lifes, which he first saw as a teenager, and how their ‘crazy town’ contents document the Dutch Republic’s status as a trading capital, commanding exotic goods from across the world: a precursor to the unnatural array of the produce aisle in any supermarket in California. In a recent image from an LA street market, the taut, polished surfaces of tomatoes are joined by the spotted skin of a cocoa fruit, a crop Dodgson had never seen before. ‘I think, sometimes, the strongest points in my work come from this feeling of: What is that?’ he says. ‘I want the photographs to feel like when I see the thing in real life, how I felt when I met this fruit.’

Rooted in real experience – of the subtleties of place, the facts of light, the material of the actual – what these images often most look like, to me, are memories: those things which we may one day find are all we ever really had.

This article first appeared in Frieze Week Los Angeles magazine under the title ‘Living Day Lights’. 

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^{Main image: Colin Dodgson, 30 Knots, 2021}