TO BE DEVELOPED, TO BE CONTINUED
This project is an album of aches about aging and invisibility. A thirteen-year-old daughter’s wildness, fragility, and innocence as she hurtles towards womanhood. A mother’s reverent, longing eye at a time when she is increasingly underestimated and overlooked by a society that worships youthfulness.
Winner of the 2023 Tall Poppy Press award, this project, which combines poetry, prose, and photographs, will be published in 2024.
THE LONG SHADOW
The Long Shadow: Unwrapped ~ Marion Post Wolcott’s Labor and Love reveals the unpublished life and images of the American photographer Marion Post Wolcott. Wolcott was the first woman hired as a full-time photographer for the Farm Security Administration in 1938 during America’s Great Depression. Three years later, having made more than 9,000 pictures, Wolcott received ultimatums from her husband, Lee Wolcott, and boss, Roy Stryker: 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
Odette England collects photographs of men taking pictures of women without permission, women rejecting the camera by placing their hands over their faces, and men posing with guns. For England, these images suggest a complex relationship between guns, cameras, and violence against women, and, as she points out, both Susan Sontag and Teju Cole have written of the shared vocabulary between guns and cameras that load, aim, and shoot. In making these connections, England hopes to surface the problematic visual habits embedded in our culture and work towards an alternative way of using the camera to share our voices rather than normalize violence.
Recipient of a Puffin Foundation grant and shortlisted for the 2023 Images Vevey Book Award, this project 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.
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 her collaborator 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.