In his first monograph, Earthquake Weather, photographer Colin Dodgson brings together a decade of images shaped by light, weather, chance and the everyday, tracing the uneasy ways we try to make sense of a world we cannot control
“Nature always wins,” says photographer Colin Dodgson. “You can’t really outsmart it or bend it to your will.” We check our apps, look up at the sky, measure the temperature and read the wind. We want to know what is coming, even when we know that the forecast is only ever provisional. Earthquake Weather, the title of Dodgson’s first monograph which is published by Loose Joints, carries something of this contradiction. It has the language of something descriptive and scientific, while giving little indication of the images within. That is partly the point; it leaves the book open to the same uncertainty that governs the photographs themselves.
The images in Earthquake Weather have accumulated over the space of a decade, without initially being intended as a single body of work. Rather than being organised around a single event or argument, meaning emerges retrospectively, through repetition and association. Dodgson describes the process of putting the book together as an attempt to resist the linear narrative that photography can so easily impose. But over time, certain subjects and formal relationships begin to recur – a paperback book, a body, a wave, a piece of plastic, a damaged surface, a smoked cigarette, a patch of sunlight. Eventually, there are enough of them to form a constellation.
“A lot of my work is to do with being alive,” Dodgson says. “You’re a human and you’re experiencing these things, you’re recording it in your brain to then make something with it.” His photographs are populated by items that might otherwise pass without notice. A paperback book becomes a record of touch and time, its pages warped by water into small waves. “Something as banal as a paperback book has so many visual signifiers,” he says. “Each has its own life, its own story.” Dodgson remembers keeping his mattress on the floor. Next to it was a stack of books, which became the first and last thing he would see each day. “Books are very personal,” he says. “They go through journeys with you.” When he recently found a gold-leaf Bible at Goodwill, it was its intricacies and material qualities that interested him; elsewhere, it was the coloured pages of a pulp-fiction zine that caught his attention.
Earthquake Weather becomes a book about consumption without being a book about consumerism. If objects move through our lives and acquire meaning through our memories and experiences, Dodgson photographs what is left behind, reminding us that everything is subject to wear and change. His attention to materiality is inseparable from his understanding of light and the process of working in the darkroom. “If we’re speaking scientifically, without light there is no vision in a way,” he says. “We’re only seeing what we see because it’s reflected light.” In Dodgson’s photographs, this principle becomes almost tactile as sunlight settles on skin, paper, plastic and concrete. Each image has a dense, syrupy, sunburnt quality, a warmth, saturated in yellow by the Californian sun, where the photographer lives. He describes sunset light as one of the few things to which he has an uncomplicated emotional attachment. “That’s sort of the idealisation of that,” he says. “And that’s what I think is the prettiest.”
Among the photographs are fragments of scientific information, including CO₂ readings, alongside imagery Dodgson made in collaboration with the World Land Trust. Such material is not presented as an explanation for the photographs, but rather as a testament to his observation and fieldwork – as with photography, a means of making sense of a world that is continuously changing. Nature, Dodgson recognises, remains indifferent to our attempts to control it. The photographs are not illustrations of environmental collapse, nor are they celebrations of the natural world. Instead, they attend to the smaller ways in which humans coexist with conditions they can’t fully command.
This relationship extends to Dodgson’s commercial practice, which intersects with his personal work throughout the book. Many people will know his photographs through fashion and advertising, commercial work that requires him to respond to a brief; his personal work begins from a less clearly defined impulse. But he does not consider the two contradictory. “My art practice is where I’m able to explore my technique and what I’m interested in, and I bring that into how I look at other things,” he explains, comparing the relationship to making a pizza. “You’re making a pizza for someone else,” he says. “Your ingredients don’t change, you’ll just have to tweak it a tiny bit to suit their taste and preferences.”
In this sense, Earthquake Weather is less concerned with nature as a subject than with our relationship to the world around us. We measure it, photograph it, consume it, predict it and build systems around its instability in an attempt to understand it, and yet those systems are always provisional. The result is a book about life and the everyday, each image subject to the same forces as the things it depicts: light, weather, time, damage, chance.
Earthquake Weather is published by Loose Joints and out now.