Colin Dodgson's Earthquake Weather: A Decade of Light and Uncertainty

Photographer Colin Dodgson's first monograph, Earthquake Weather, published by Loose Joints, compiles a decade of images exploring light, weather, chance, and the everyday. The book's title reflects the contradiction between scientific language and the uncertainty governing the photographs. Dodgson describes the process as resisting linear narrative, with meaning emerging through repetition and association. Recurring subjects include paperback books, bodies, waves, plastic, damaged surfaces, cigarettes, and patches of sunlight. His work emphasizes materiality and the tactile quality of light, often saturated by the Californian sun. The book includes fragments of scientific data, such as CO₂ readings, and imagery made in collaboration with the World Land Trust, presented as testament to observation rather than explanation. Dodgson's commercial practice in fashion and advertising intersects with his personal work, which he compares to making a pizza: the ingredients remain the same, but tweaked to suit a brief. Ultimately, Earthquake Weather is less about nature as a subject than about humanity's relationship to an uncontrollable world, measuring, photographing, and predicting it, while acknowledging that systems are always provisional.