Photographer Colin Dodgson Made a Book About Nothing. That’s the Point.

You may not know Colin Dodgson by name, but chances are you know his photographs. Over the past decade, Dodgson has forged a career as one of fashion’s key image-makers, his signature golden look defining campaigns for household names like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Stüssy and Marni.

His new book, Earthquake Weather, published by Marseille-based Loose Joints, is built from photographs accumulated over those years, drawing unexpected connections between otherwise disparate subjects. He pulls from all aspects of his practice, from a portrait of actor John Malkovich to an image of an old book, treating each with the same care and sensibility.

His practice is deeply tactile. He hand-prints his photographs in the darkroom, and that physicality seeps into Earthquake Weather itself. Yellowed pages of a book, rows of water bottles in Japan, and the surface of a skull are rendered with a sumptuous richness. Taken as a whole, the work resists a single reading, leaving enough space for connections to emerge on their own. And as Dodgson puts it, there are no wrong answers.

How would you describe Earthquake Weather for someone yet to see it?

I didn't want to make a book that was necessarily about a certain type of subject matter or that had a definite beginning or ending. Within my practice, there's so many things happening at different times that continue into other parts. I'll be doing one thing, which will lead to something over here which will then then lead to something over there. I wanted to try to make a book that was like that.

One of the traps of photo books is that they’re always about something. I know that sounds kind of like a dumb answer, but it's always like a very specific body of work. Whereas I like to see the artist in the artist's book, where it's not necessarily about something specific but what's happening in the artist's mind or life.

To put it in a funnier, simpler way, it's a bit like how Seinfeld was a show about nothing, but had its own set of parameters that it existed within, and within that structure you can do a lot. It's sort of like being about nothing but also being about everything at the same time. 

When you started putting the edit together, were you pulling from photographs you’d been making over time? Are you always shooting personal work?

I'm not someone who carries a camera around all the time, unless I have an intention to make work about something. 

The first time I came to Tokyo for instance, I did carry my camera around with me everywhere because everything was so new and so fresh. But then you start to notice certain things that really draw your attention and I spend a lot of time focused on those things. It becomes me going specifically for two or three hours out of the day to photograph something. It's sort of like I am photographing all the time in a way, but not physically. 

You don't have a camera. But you’re always looking...

Yeah, something goes by, or something has just the right glint, or a color combination makes you think about something else, or a guy’s uniform has this one little swish on it, and that goes back to something you had for an idea for set design or something like that. 

The thing that struck me flicking through the book was the sense of physicality and texture in a lot of the images. There are books, worn objects, and surfaces that feel really tactile and real. Was that something you were thinking about as you made the work? 

That might be a sign of a very refined practice, of what I’m drawn to and what I find interesting after however long I’ve been making work. I am able to identify things that would make good photographs, as opposed to something that you just see and photograph.

I was having this thought recently about this body of work that I'm working on at the moment. There's a couple different things that have to tick all these different boxes in order for them to be a successful version of what it is I'm trying to find. And maybe that tactile part is a part of it. Like, there has to be some sort of physicality to it. 

Photographs are very two-dimensional. You want the photographs to be objects in themselves, but sometimes in order to do that, you have to photograph something that is an object and that is tactile. Sometimes you see something and photograph it and think, “I want to make that into a sculpture.” But then you do, and it doesn’t work. The photograph is actually better. It’s a better representation of its physicality.

I was wondering if there’s a connection between the tactile things you’re drawn to and the fact that you also physically work with photographs in the darkroom. Does that feel connected?

It probably does hit all those notes throughout the process but it’s not something that I necessarily look for. The tactile nature of these things is sort of their existence, right? It’s just observing that and photographing it well enough, in the right light at the right time, to get the best version of it. But it can’t just be that. That’s not enough. That’s just a pretty picture.

A lot of the things I do have some sort of root in humor. You mentioned the books [I shot]. To me, that was this self-contained idea to do with them having titles already, and the work itself having a title already is funny to me. 

Say you photograph Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and the title of the photograph is Frankenstein, and it’s just the spine of the book. It has its own sculptural meaning, but it’s already gotten rid of that.

Another example is these water bottles I’ve been photographing in Japan. They’re sort of hilarious because they’re based on this myth that filling bottles with water keeps cats from peeing on your house. It’s been proven not to work, but people still do it. No one really seems to know why they’re still everywhere. They’re like these little mythic totems. Sometimes something being funny to me makes it that much better.

As I’m photographing them, I’m remembering some of the rules I had in my head from when I did it the last time, a couple of years ago. They have to look as though they’re lit from within, usually because of the way the sunlight hits them. They have to be performing a job, whether that’s holding something down or still being useful in some way. The fact that they’re recycled bottles filled with water also gives them an environmental background. So, it’s all these things combined together. The tactile thing is just one part of that bigger picture.

When you go out with a camera, are there certain boxes something has to tick before you’ll photograph it?

Through repeated practice, you start to really narrow things down. Photography is so forced in a way because you have to do it in that moment but if you had the space and time to make things as you want to make them, then that’s when you really start cooking. That’s the good stuff.

Sometimes when I’m doing a fashion shoot, it’s really like that because I’m able to completely control everything that I see.

When I go out and take pictures, whether I’m in Malaysia or Argentina, I do shoot a lot, but it’s only for a pretty short period, 10 or 12 days usually. What happens from shooting that much in such a short amount of time is that you start to see patterns emerge as you’re doing the work, and you start to figure it out as it’s happening.

For example, I could notice that those frogs are always under a rock, and those rocks are always facing this way in the sun, and the sun’s only like this at this part of the day. Then you just focus on that, and it becomes a larger series that way. 

The title Earthquake Weather makes it feel like something is about to happen. Was that sense of anticipation intentional?

It’s another one of these weird sort of myths that’s been disproven. I grew up in Southern California. We had a big earthquake, the Northridge earthquake in the ‘90s, and there was always this talk of what earthquake weather was, but there’s no such thing. It’s a title that I had in my head for a very long time that I thought could be attributed to making a book about nothing, because it’s about nothing. I like the sound of it, Earthquake Weather. There is no reality in it, and it has nothing to do with the work inside the book. Again, it’s kind of like the mythic nature of those bottles.

It’s weird because, and this is definitely not premeditated, but the amount of earthquakes happening around the world this year is higher than normal. 

It’s a really good title, even if it has nothing to do with the work. The ambiguity of it makes you start drawing connections. Do you like that people can bring their own meaning to it?

It's more interesting to me to do something that's more interpretable and less prescribed. It's fun to interpret those things as a viewer and to have some things left for you to figure out. 

That was my experience with the book. I like that it leaves enough space for you to make your own connections. Do you like leaving that ambiguity in the work?

I think there is no wrong. In the same way that there’s no wrong way to walk around the city and take photographs, there’s no wrong way to experience your own life. There’s no wrong way to do anything, really. The way my brain works, it’s not always such a straight line from one thing to the next. I think the best way to illustrate that is through a sort of non-linear, non-hierarchical, more democratic way of presenting things.

For instance, in the book there’s a picture of Willem Dafoe, and then there’s a picture of a skull that’s sort of a nod to memento mori from art history. But the skull itself is clear. It’s all the same thing to me, but it’s sort of the way that it gets done.

It’s all over the place all the time. I’m just trying to make more books, works and exhibitions like that, that don’t have such a huge stamp on people as to what they are or aren’t supposed to be.

Earthquake Weather by Colin Dodgson is published by Loose Joints.