TO BE DEVELOPED, TO BE CONTINUED
A thirteen-year-old daughter’s wildness and fragility as she hurtles towards womanhood. A fifty-year-old mother’s reverent, longing eyes at a time when she is increasingly underestimated and overlooked by a society that worships youthfulness. Winner of the Tall Poppy Press award, this project, which combines photography and prose, will be published in 2025.
THE LONG SHADOW
The Long Shadow reveals the unpublished life and images of Marion Post Wolcott, the first woman hired as a full-time photographer for the Farm Security Administration in 1938. Three years later, having made more than 9,000 pictures, Wolcott received ultimatums from her husband and boss: choose family or photography. Wolcott quit her job and spent eleven years managing three dairy farms in rural Virginia. One assumed that Wolcott gave up photographing. That assumption was wrong. This project received the Ansel Adams Research Fellowship from the Center for Creative Photography, a grant from the Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund for Historical Photographic Research of the Humboldt Area Foundation, and a publishing support grant from Polycopies & Co. Order a copy.
WOMAN WEARING RING SHIELDS FACE FROM FLASH
This project uses photographs to highlight the complex relationships between guns, cameras, hands, and violence against women. Recipient of a Puffin Foundation grant and shortlisted for the 2023 Images Vevey Book Award, it was published by Skinnerboox in 2023. Order a copy.
YOUR DISTANCE MAKES ME CLOSE TO YOU
These photographs document the sinewy relationship between homesickness, beauty, and finding a home in being away.
DAIRY CHARACTER
Dairy Character is a loose chronicle of growing up female in a rural farming community. It combines recent photographs, family snapshots, archival images, and twenty short stories to highlight similarities between the objectification of dairy cows and women. Order a signed copy.
BURIED (UNFINISHED BUSINESS)
Odette England has revisited her family’s former dairy farm for almost two decades, walking the lands they loved and lost and taking pictures. Her parents and daughter join in, and she directs them to take photographs. She then processes the negatives and buries some in the soil. She attaches some to trees and farm buildings. Months or years later, England returns to ‘harvest’ these negatives to make prints. It is a ritual of history and memory, what happens when we look at pain through a viewfinder and zoom in on scars. It is also an autopsy of her relationship with a place she still calls home but no longer lives.
NATURE IS A PHOTOGRAPH
Photographs made during an artist-writer residency in Lecce, Italy with Mark Steinmetz and Irina Rozovsky.
PAST PAPER // PRESENT MARKS
This collaborative project of unique camera-less photograms was made at Robert Rauschenberg’s property in Captiva, Florida. The images – created using expired 1970s gelatin silver paper found in Rauschenberg’s darkroom – were submerged and exposed in his swimming pool and then developed and fixed with expired chemistry. Odette England and Jennifer Garza-Cuen employed an array of interventions before immersing the expired paper in water. Exposures were made overnight and throughout the day, allowing different levels and intensities of sunlight, moonlight, and water to penetrate the paper. Order a signed copy.