Photography Lecture Series with Odette England

"The Wheel"

"The Wheel" discusses a collection of Odette England’s recent photographic series, for which the binding thematic spine is memory.  England’s work, which is personal, conceptual, and autobiographical, reflects a need to address unfinished business with who she is and where she is from.

In particular her research examines the value of the family snapshot and its challenging, often contradictory relationship to memory. Snapshots are her flash cards. England reinvents and reframes them, discovering absences within them, which exacerbate “a past that will not pass. (1)"

Today’s predominance of screen-only interaction has made the importance of the photograph as a memory-based object more beguiling (2).  Through her research England probes the craftsmanship and materiality of family photographs in the digital age. Through photographic acts of self-reflection and self-erasure, she ponder the roles of daughter, parent, and archivist. England thinks of her photographs (and memories) as birthmarks: unique signs that may fade over time, always individual, and sometimes undecipherable.

Using a variety of materials including expired film and photographic chemicals, an inexpensive point-and-shoot camera, and damaged negatives, England transforms loss and maps grief. She explore the volatility of identity, emphasizing the fluctuating nature of the past/present seesaw.

Her need to re-do, to reconstruct personal spaces, to make copies of copies, is a quest for clarity of a love of the past that she cannot explain rationally.  Her photographic threshold is that situational dilemma: I cannot go back.

Odette England is a lecturer at the University of South Australia.  England has participated in exhibitions globally including the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film (Rochester, NY); the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL); the New Mexico Museum of Art (Santa Fe, NM); Durham Art Gallery (Durham, UK); the Photographic Resource Center (Boston, MA); the Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO); Host Gallery (London, UK) and the Newspace Center for Photography (Portland, OR).

(1) Ricoeur (2004)

(2) Fredrickson (2013)

Image caption: Dad #4 (Left Foot), from the series Thrice Upon A Time, 2012, Odette England