WHITEHOT MAGAZINE
OCTOBER 2025
LAURA DODSON AT SOHOPHOTO GALLERY
By MARIO NAVES October 6, 2025
The photographs of Laura Dodson offer a curious admixture of contradictory impulses, embodying, as they do, pre-modernist splendor through up-to-the-minute means.
The effusive nature of Dodson's pictures recalls the sparkling rectitude of 17th-century Dutch still-life painting and 19th-century artists like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as well as the symbolism of Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau. As with these precedents, Dodson pays keen attention to the particulars of image and texture, endowing her objects with an eye toward the crystalline and the metaphysical.
However sweeping its historical reach, Dodson's art is very much tethered to our technological moment. Forget the camera--a tool whose bicentennial, it’s worth nothing, is just around the corner--Dodson employs image editing software when shaping her images. The resulting compendiums of footwear, flora and foodstuffs are remarkably tactile. The chilly artifice we've come to associate with digital manipulation is waylaid by a temperament that places a premium on the tangible and, with that, the sensual.
The irony inherent in Dodson's recent series, collectively titled "Shoe Stories," is that the precision of the mises en scène--no item, reference or juxtaposition in the compositions is choreographed lightly--only goes to amplify their mystery. The French critic and poet Stéphane Mallarmé extolled the virtues of a poem “which is made to be divined bit by bit." So it is with Dodson's reliquaries: Malleability of space and structure amplify the metaphorical capacity of the souvenirs within her purview. The photos shift and shimmer like memories forever threatening to slip from our grasp.
Why shoes? Dodson points to the powers they hold in classic fairy tales--the ability to transport, transform and otherwise manifest an individual’s destiny. A current of feminism undergirds the scenarios--the shoes of women and children predominate—and traditional notions of femininity punctuate them. That, and the sometimes gaudy nature of shoe design is in keeping with an artist who is unafraid—in fact, relishes--the pleasures of ornamentation.
Within the intricate byways of Dodson’s photographs, there is a world of contradictions made fetching and tenable. WM
