Colin Dodgson collaborates with his own crew of young-and-beautiful friends to make photos that are like dark, disturbing one-act plays. His subjects, with trance-like eyes and faces painted in lurid, stagey make-up, seem to inhabit a viscerally charged alternative reality. Dodgson takes us to a world where the rules of daily life do not apply — as in the absurdist theater of Eugene Unesco.

Growing up in Southern California, Colin wanted to be a professional surfer as a kid. After high school, he switched gears and attended the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, where he soon rebelled against the school’s regimented technical regime and took off for New York.

Arriving in the city in 2006, Colin has shot for various indie magazines like Arkitip and The Journal, plus websites like www.contributingeditor.com. For  indexmagazine.com, he has done portraits to accompany interviews with playwright Thomas Bradshaw and musician Dan Deacon.

But his personal work is something else altogether — peculiar, melodramatic images transforming his friends into the strange characters of his own psychologically charged scenarios.

- Molly Kincaid