Odette England Answers Every Photographer's Worst Fear, E126

Odette England  makes her photographs and then damages them, and this conversation is about why that is the most honest thing she has ever done with her voice.Odette is an Australian artist, writer and photography professor at Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University, whose latest book Isn't X Beautiful is an autobiographical reckoning with family, memory and the limits of what a photograph can hold.We talk about growing up on a 200 acre dairy farm in rural South Australia where her father made Polaroid portraits of newborn calves for their birth certificates and her mother typed captions into family albums, and how those 2 modes of picture keeping shaped everything she has made since. We go into her definition of beauty, which is broken, rusty and forlorn rather than pretty, the year she asked her elderly parents to walk their lost farm with her negatives strapped to the soles of their shoes, why she believes photography is drenched in want, and what writing gives her that photography cannot.Odette talks openly about doubt, about being the least confident person in her own practice, about the drawers of failed work she now calls her box of potentials, and about the daily sentence habit that turned into something she never intended. We finish inside the critique room, on the questions she asks photographers who bring her work they cannot yet explain.Other things we discussed:Being refused entry to her school darkroom because she was a girlBeing the only woman in her classWhy the letter X sits at the centre of her book, and why the title ends in an exclamation markThe 170 English words for the act of seeingThe folly of memory, wrong captions, and choosing to remember the fictionHer image-based retelling of Susan Sontag's On PhotographyWhy she thinks moving forward is not always the right next stepWhat she sees in students of every age that worries her mostFind Odette on her website and Instagram: https://www.odetteengland.com https://www.instagram.com/odetteengland ___________________________________________________Message me, leave a comment and join in the conversation!Support the show_________________________________ Thank you for listening and for being a part of this incredible community. You can listen and watch full extended and ad-free episodes in my community - The MOOD Insiders - where I also share insights, photography tips and behind-the-scenes content on my channel as well as meet with the community on book club weekly events, special guest features, bonus content, open forum access, free resources and so much more. Join The Community - extended episodes & bonus features https://www.mattjacob.co/insidersThe App That Transformed My Art & Mind https://wakingup.sjv.io/c/7738181/3958771/54965Website: https://themoodpodcast.comSocials: IG | X | TikTok | Threads | YouTube | @mattyj_ay