Odette England Answers Every Photographer's Worst Fear, E126

I feel like terror is this like low hum that runs through all of my work.
There's some kind of terror of loss, terror of being slightly misplaced, terror of things that I that I love or that I'm in love with being away from me or me being left without these things.
That's Odette England, Australian photographer, professor at the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University.
Her latest book, Isn't X Beautiful, is an autobiographical reckoning with family, memory, and everything photography can and cannot hold.
Photography for me is drenched you want.
It's one thing for me to make the work about the theme or about the topic.
It's quite another to take the own work that you have spent, in my case, more than 20 years making photographing of this place, and then to actively destroy it.
Like that, that's it's perverse.
The more truly vulnerable and sincere and honest you can be with yourself as a person and as an artist, the more you can do that, richer your work will be, regardless of what it is, regardless of what you're saying.
If you've ever polished your work so much to the point that it lost the shape of you, then listen to how Odette masterfully makes her art out of the exact material most photographers try to keep out of the frame.
This conversation is about beauty, memory, finding a voice, and why Odette says your most broken parts are the ones that are really worth showing.
I love broken things, forlorn things, rusty things, I like things that are brown and yellow.
I wanted that terror, I wanted that loss, I wanted the brokenness to be part of the work.
There's something that will fall away, like a lopsy JPEG of my past, that just falls away and I can't get it back.
I don't know what I'm losing, I can't retrieve it.
I love the idea that something deep and connective and beautiful has occurred to make you appreciate it.
Something has had to go awry.
If there's loss, it means that love has happened.
You keep making and you expect nothing.
I expect nothing and I make everything.
I am the least confident individual in my own work and practice, but I do it because I love it and I do it for me.
Does it mean there has to have been conflict as part of that?
Oh, Dad, uh, what an honor it is to have you on the Mood Podcast.
Thank you for taking the time to jump online with me today.
I'm so happy to be here and so excited.
Thank you for the invite.
Uh yeah, you're very welcome.
And uh we we met in person uh from a review you gave me at Chico, and this is kind of how we we started contact, really.
Um but I've been a big fan of yours for a few years now.
And we're gonna jump into my interest in your work and and your books, obviously, and what kind of sparked my interest.
But um, I wanted to start with a bit of background on you, certainly for people who may not know who you are.
And I think one uh springboard into that is your name.
And I was doing some research, and I didn't know this until I was actually doing some deliberate research on you in preparation for podcasts.
But Odette means lover of home, correct?
I I'd I'd love for you to elaborate on that a little bit, yeah.
It does.
So my dad had my dad was a dairy farmer and had a baby's names book that he used to use for naming all the calves that were born at the farm.
And so the calves had extraordinary names.
They had a first name, a middle name, and a surname.
And when he was naming my brother and I, he was looking through this baby's names book and came across Odette and thought, oh, that's lovely, because mum and dad are Colin and Helen, and they wanted something a bit more interesting than, you know, or something a little less ordinary.
And it was, I was probably in my early 30s when I found out what my name meant.
And I was I was like, oh, this makes sense.
This is me.
What other names were were in the book that he might have called you?
Oh Peaches was definitely one of them.
Nazareth.
Yeah, I think it was going in in sort of you know alphabetical order and trying to find the most, you know, obtuse name that he possibly could.
But Peaches and Nazareth were two of them.
I forget some of the others.
They were dreadful.
So d so you said it's you know it's a perfect name for you.
What is um give give us a little bit of a a history about your home?
You talked about being raised on a farm and and having a lot of kind of resonance with the lifestyle of being on a farm.
And that, you know, you can see a lot of that obviously through a lot of your work and some of your books.
Give me um give me a bit more of a an explicit description of how how you were brought up as a as a child on a farm in in Australia.
Yeah, so the dairy farm that I grew up in was um people used to measure farm by acreage.
That's how it was, oh, he's got 200 acres.
We had a two, just over 200 acre dairy farm uh in a very small community in very rural southern Australia on the river.
And the community had maybe 67 people in it, maybe 20, 25 dairy farms.
There was one road in and one road out, and all of the farmland was on the left-hand side of the road, and all of the farmhouses and the highlands was on the right-hand side.
And we grew up mostly devoid from anything that you would experience in a town or a city.
So we had dubious access to television.
We had two newspapers that would come.
One was the Stock Journal.
So you could read about cows and pigs and horses, and we didn't have too many books.
We there were no shops, no taxis, no cinemas, no surface roads, and certainly in my time there, no internet, no cell phones.
So you learned by what you saw, and you learned by what you put your hands to, and you learned by experimentation and storytelling.
Storytelling was a huge part of growing up in this place because if you weren't outdoors fixing something, raising something, grow growing something, you were or working, you were doing the other kind of working, which was sitting around a table and sharing a story or listening to a story.
And the community that I grew up in was very uh male-dominant.
There were very few women.
The women who were there were farmers' wives, very few daughters, because the families wanted sons to be able to take over the farm and to be able to work.
And it was it was quite a um faith-based religious community.
Almost everyone went to church across the river on the rickety old ferry every Sunday.
And everyone knew everyone's business.
If you did not know what the inside of someone's farmhouse looked like, there was something wrong.
I still remember people's refrigerators, what they, you know, the the fridge magnets that people had.
You you just knew everyone's face.
And so you knew everyone's lives and lifestyles, and um it was just a given that you were in each other's lives.
So there was there were good parts to that and and somewhat um maybe not so good parts to that.
You didn't have privacy.
Yeah.
Nor did you need it, because you didn't why why why would you need that?
Of course it wouldn't.
Didn't even think about caring about it.
It's just not at all.
Yeah.
Sorry to cut away from the episode for a minute, but I wanted to talk to you about something very quickly.
Now I spent a long time thinking that isolation was part of the deal when it came to photography.
That if you were serious about the work, you did it alone.
You'd consume enough, watch enough, read enough, and eventually it would all cohere into something meaningful.
And it sometimes did.
But mostly I was just alone with my doubts and no one to push back on them.
What changed things for me wasn't a course or a workshop, it was a conversation with someone who was doing the same kind of work and cared about it in exactly the same way I did.
The doubts didn't disappear, but they got a little bit smaller and I felt more okay with them.
They got named.
That's what I'm building with the Mood Insiders.
It's a place where the work is taken seriously, where you can bring your questions and, of course, your half-finished ideas, and where someone will actually engage with them.
We have the ad-free extended podcast episodes with bonus content, we have monthly masterclasses, QA sessions, and of course the weekly book clubs, and direct direct access to me and my team, because you don't have to do this alone.
So the link is in the show notes, and hopefully I'll see you inside.
You talk about it like it was um just yesterday.
You know, this this uh concept of memory is is very, very interesting to me.
And I think you really work on that uh, you know, memory as an action philosophy and and just hearing you talk about knowing, you know, remembering what the inside of people's fridges were.
You know, I know it's a small community, but um how where did the s how did that storytelling and your me your memory of this kind of come into it?
Do you think they're intertwined, right?
You know, memory is a story in itself, or storytelling in itself.
I've heard you talk about that like that before.
So when it kind of makes sense when you introduce it like that, but I'm I'm interested now to like the storytelling side of images and what and you know, with this one thing telling stories around a campfire.
Where did the the photography side of things come in and how were you introduced to to it in in regards to the the storytelling and memory uh you know collision?
Yeah.
Oh, collision is such a good word because it does feel like a collision.
You know, things hit you and bounce off you.
I think there were two main modes.
You know, the the the farmers' wives were responsible for making pictures of their children, and but in a very discreet, inexpensive way, because film was expensive.
It was expensive to buy, it was expensive to process, and you might have four rolls of film a year.
Because when you went and got it processed, you'd have to drive it all the way into the town and then go and pick it up, you know, two months later, and then you'd realize that there were pictures from Easter and from someone else's birthday in April when you picked it up in, you know, September, because that's how long it took you to fill a 36-roll film.
And it was the wife's job and therefore the daughter's job to write captions.
My mum had a beautiful old blue Remington typewriter, and she would type the captions, and she would teach me that's how I learned to type was typing photo captions that would go into one of those albums with the acetate pages and would stick them in four to a page on this beautiful, now very beautiful, bluster paper that had the rounded corners and the caption would go on, and then for good measure, because women were fantastic archivists, would write details on the back of these pictures as well.
And so that's how I learned one mode of picture caretaking.
It wasn't that it was just a recording of what kids and farm life was like or birthday, because it was all around events, Easters, birthdays, Christmases, Mother's Day, Father's Day, all these kind of official events.
Or when you went for a big fishing trip, a fishing trip meaning a day down at the river, and you caught, you know, 20 fish, and then the fish would be lined up and you would present the objects to the camera.
It was this presentation mode.
Um, so there was that.
And then the second part was photography as work.
All of the farmers photographed their calves every spring.
And so they would wrestle, and that's how my my book, Is an X Beautiful, starts in chapter one, is me recounting this story of my dad making photographs of calves, wrestling them into position as if they would stay, a newborn calf that's, you know, just learned to stand up, wrestling it into position, ready for his SX 70 polar road to make a photograph, to make a portrait of a calf.
And this portrait would then go onto a birth certificate.
It was a blue slip of paper, and that went in a filing cabinet in alphabetical order by year.
So it was there was photography for work, photography for pleasure, always record keeping, always archiving with this very specific mode of care attached, but a very different way of thinking about care.
Wow.
I'm so jealous of that upbringing.
I'm sure it wasn't as as fun as that all the time.
But um I I've heard you also talk about never wanting history to let go of you.
And I feel like there's that documentative side of you that you know, photography as a utility, photography as a document, photography as an object, or a photograph is an object, nothing more.
And then you see this other side of you that's much more expressive, much more metaphorical, much more evocative.
And there's this beautiful, maybe collision again, but there's this beautiful symbiosis, I guess, with both those sides that you still seem to carry with you today.
What is it about this again, coming back to like memory and history and nostalgia, I guess?
It's like you don't want to let go of any of that, or is it is it more just a curiosity that you have with your own mind and how you remember things?
I think it's both.
Like I I like testing myself to see what I can and can't remember.
And I think by virtue of the way I grew up, like the girls in this community, we were discouraged from speaking in the company of the male farmer.
And certainly around the table storytelling, you know, we we used our senses sort of in the quantity bestowed.
It was two ears, two eyes, one mouth.
And so I was I taught, I was taught by virtue of example that I was to listen and I was to take information in, but I wasn't to question and I wasn't to comment.
So I had to, I had to retain, if I wanted to retain anything, I had to retain it from something verbal.
Interesting.
The flip side of that is that I grew up at a time in the, this is like the late 70s, early to mid-80s in a rural community where when you're untouched by culture or untouched by city culture, your the way that you learn is very different.
And the romance that's wrapped around farm life as a kid, because it is very romantic, it's hard work, but you you you work, but you you you play at the same time within the confines of what you have available to play, and you don't appreciate it until you step away from it, and then you go, oh Mum and Dad had all of the stress twenties and their 30s of trying to keep their livelihood alive, working 24 hours a day and never getting a day off because dad had to milk the cows twice a day, so we never went on holiday.
But I I got to play and experience life without the worry or stress of anything that wasn't immediate.
The cows are out, oh, we fix it.
The electricity's down, get the candles.
You know, if something went wrong, it was a fairly quick and immediate fix, and the community would band together to fix it.
But there wasn't this the same kind of worry, I think, that I would ex have experienced it had I been an adult.
So there's the romance of the time, there's the romance of being a child and then a teenager in that environment and not having the same kind of responsibility.
It was a much more a hands-on kind of responsibility that we had.
Because if we didn't fix things, they would break or die.
If we didn't caretake the animals, they would die and therefore our livelihood would go away.
It was very much a kind of worry that was built around if we don't fix it, we can't live.
If we don't grow this thing, we have nothing to eat.
Very different.
Lots of big lessons that I'm sure really carried you well in adulthood, but a lot of um, you know, I guess I'm more interested in the the things that you may have been protected from, or certainly the way women were treated uh in that area at that time.
You must have gone out into the world, you know, as a as a young woman and just gone, what the f like there's, you know, how do I how how do how do I survive?
Where do I go?
What do I do?
Can I speak?
And you know, I'm interested in was photography a part of your life then when you're leaving home and and how did it evolve more in in terms of creating that vo or refining that voice that you inevitably were going to have?
Yeah, at the farm, we were I was always sculpting things, and I didn't appreciate that until I went to art school years and years later.
I would make things out of wire.
When we were fishing, there was this beautiful clay uh by the river, and I would make clay cats, clay dogs, clay pigeons, clay, all sorts of things.
So I was constantly making it, just wasn't considered art because no one in this community, I mean, you you didn't go to the city very often.
No one I knew had been to college or university, in fact, that was actively discouraged.
No one had been to a museum or a gallery.
So our version of art was what whatever was stuck to the refrigerator and what you brought home from school, and maybe you made something out of pipe cleaners or straws or you glued pasta to things.
That was my idea of art.
So when I left home, I got a federal government scholarship, um, which they were giving at the time to encourage rural girls to go to the city to study.
And I remember in my first year of grade eight, there were so many references that people were talking about television and music and films and things.
I had no idea.
Like ACDC, isn't that a current?
That's a thing I associate with electricity.
It is not a band of cool dudes jumping about, like there's no Angus Young.
Like I had to catch up so fast, and I would spend half my time, like anytime I had spare time, I was in the library reading books, going, What?
What do you what's this thing?
What's this thing?
I don't understand this thing.
And so I would draw, you know, I would, I would read, I would come across these books on art.
A friend that my my mum took a job in the town uh to help keep us afloat on the farm for as long as possible.
And one of her work colleagues, Ten, had a 35 millimeter camera and a Nikon F1.
And he gave it to me.
He he considered himself an amateur photographer, and he gave it to me and said, just put it on F8, genius and film, go.
And so I learned by just playing with this old camera and trying to make pictures of things that I was interested in.
Usually nature, old trees, dead cars, um, anything that would link me to what I was seeing and used to seeing at the farm.
Um and that became my outlet from the enormous, like the hamster wheel that was going on in my head for you know, a year or more, just feeling like I was in catch-up mode of, oh, what's what's what's this person about?
I've I've never read this book or seen this film.
Who's Tom Cruise?
What's he all about?
Was Top Gun out at that time?
Yeah, when was this believer?
Top Gun 86.
Yeah, and uh just so many people.
I'm like, wow, who's that?
Does he live here?
And you know, I would get laughed at so much for my dumb questions.
Yeah.
Because I and and and I'm not naturally, I'm not quick and I'm not funny, but I can laugh at myself a lot, you know?
And and I was really good at handling, because I'd grow up in a community of boys.
I could do stuff, like I could change a tire and I could skin a rabbit, and I could gut a fish.
And so that's how I navigated my way through high school amongst the.
At that time, like when you get into photography, I mean met another male dominated dominated craft, I guess, at that time, you know, gadgets, toys, and they were you kind of dismissed by men a little bit?
How was your introduction into that world?
So this the dark room, my school had a dark room.
I wasn't allowed to join because I was a girl.
All the guys who used the dark room, my cousin Gary, Anthony, uh, yeah, I I wasn't allowed to participate in that.
So I used to have to send my film to a lab in the town to get it processed.
Yeah.
Was this a the norm?
Like, or was this uh I mean, this was not that long ago, was it?
I mean, was it similar in other countries?
Was it just, you know, con uh indicative of Australia at that time?
I don't know.
I think it was probably indicative of South Australia at that time.
But I mean, uh it's not I look at my when I went and did my MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2010, jump a long way forward.
I was in a class of seven.
I was the only girl in my class.
Isn't that wild?
Yeah, that is that is well, yeah.
I I mean, yeah, I don't know what to think about that really.
I mean, it's it's I guess photography the the act of photography, because we like the layman thinks about photography as the device, right?
The camera.
They don't really think about it as an artistic expression or medium of artistic expression.
So I think because most people think, well, that's a device, that's a man thing.
You know, it's this thing that you operate and it's just the the whole whole stereotype.
I don't know.
Well, you know, it's why did why are they more male engineers than female engineers?
I don't know why they're all f more female nurses than male nurses.
I yeah, it's uh I don't know if it's uh a sign of the culture, you know, it's a byproduct of the culture, or if there is is still kind of you know things left over from from the days where that was like you said, you were not allowed in the dark room, which is just so alien to most people today to to hear that type of thing.
I know.
What was your before we move into 2010 and beyond?
I'm interested in really interested in your concept of beauty.
You know, being brought up on the farm and seeing your dad take Polaroids of uh beauty, right?
Uh in a in terms of a cow because he wanted to portray the best looking thing that that he had in front of him.
Was that did you uh uh You know, and then and then kind of emerged, I guess, with the relationship of male and females in that time in that area.
Was beauty a completely different thing, or were you taught a different concept of beauty back then?
And then when you're making your own sculptures and then moving into school and using a camera, did that change and did that evolve?
And if so, when all so I beautiful things to me, even now, I think revolve around the things that I was really attached to at the farm.
I love broken things, forlorn things, rusty things.
I like things that are brown and yellow.
I don't like that that's they're the conditions of comfort and familiarity, and there's things that I understand that I grew up around that feel so foundational and so part of who I am, how I think, how my if I look to my I have a giant bookshelf to my right, and it is an old painter's ladder.
It is just wood and two, you know, big metal tresses.
I like things that are very, very basic and very simple and very functional that to me are very beautiful because they not only work, but they remind me of the comfort of home and the smell of cooking and the feel of like bare brindle carpet under my feet and all the things that I can touch back to something where I know that I am wanted and I know that I am safe.
So that for me is that for me still to this day is beauty.
How that evolved is that beauty for me, well, as women on the farm, we we we dressed to the conditions under which we were placed.
So if you were out working, you were wearing gum boots and appalling koijeroy and home sewing shirts and probably a hard yaka bibb and brace pair of overalls, which I felt was super sexy.
I still love that.
That's my one of my favorite outfit.
Um, but when you went to church when you went shopping or anything like that, you most certainly wore a dress and a skirt and your hair was tied back, and you presented yourself as a lady.
So beauty to me, as I evolved, did not go in that direction.
I was told by the women in my family, you are beautiful only where it matters.
And the place where it matters the most is how you demonstrate your love for others.
So they never put it as saying you're beautiful on the inside kind of thing.
It was more about how you present yourself to others by the way you listen, by your behavior.
Like listening was a really different thing then.
Like you listening was participatory.
You really held on to the taste of someone's words.
That to me, to this day, is one of the most beautiful traits in another human being.
So I don't know that I went, I don't know if it's more or less conventional that I'm like, oh, I like this beautiful thing.
I love my daughter is every single day.
I think she's extraordinarily beautiful.
Uh, I will see, I saw a couple of weeks ago a guy at an airport help a little kid trying to put together some Lego.
And it was just lovely, this interaction with someone who seemed so kind and patient and caring.
And this little boy being mesmerized by witnessing and and and being part of this exchange of someone paying such close attention.
Like, yeah, that's really beautiful.
But honestly, it's probably because I'm now old that I think these things are beautiful.
Yeah, we don't we almost realize it before uh you know, after it's too late kind of thing.
But I I I couldn't agree with you more.
If I think to my my few friends that I have, quite proudly have just less than a handful of really good friends, and they are the their biggest trait.
I mean, I've put through my wife in there as well.
I can't do her any disservice because they're they're great listeners.
And that's you know that there's something about that.
And especially in today's day and age, I sound now I sound old, but especially in today's day and age where everything is short form.
I I heard someone say I I can't remember.
I was speaking to you know a marketing person about this podcast actually just a few months ago.
And it's he was he was kept mentioning this phrase long-form conversation.
I was like, no, no, no, uh it's just conversation.
When did it become long-form con like it's just convers an hour's conversation is not a long-form conversation.
That's just a conversation.
When did we get away from that?
And this whole kind of particip participatory form of listening is seems to be not lost, but it seems to be much more rare these days.
So I I couldn't agree with you more.
And it really is a beautiful part of a human being when they can actively and you know that you know when they're kind of pretending or trying to rather than actually, genuinely listening, right?
So that's that is that concept of of beauty is so almost intrinsic, and we just need to kind of bring it out of people.
But how do we do that?
You know, you talked about your daughter and and and I know you teach, and you know, we'll get on to your latest book, isn't X Beautiful, where the word beautiful is in there, and I'm I'm keen to break that down.
But you know, if we're thinking about things like listening and um you know just being a good person on the inside, how do we or how did you try and evoke that with images?
You know, is it images is is one thing.
I think we try to place too much emphasis on the beauty of images and you know, I could reference people like Robert Adams, who talk about form rather than prettiness and aesthetics.
Where do you sit on kind of beauty in in the visual image side of things?
And what what are you looking for, shall we say, when you're looking at images or when you're creating them for yourself?
Such a good question because I think there's the way that I look at things or through things and it's I'm a slow like if I think about the past couple of months where I have been actively out in the world making pictures.
I don't go out looking for photographs.
That's something Mary Ellen Mark used to say.
She would say, I go out and I'm looking for pictures, as if they're just there.
And then she finds them.
And I she said this in 2010.
And I thought, wow, I have hung to that, hung on to that for a really long time because I don't I know they're there, but I don't go out in the great hope that I will find it.
I feel like I have to craft it.
And to craft it, I have to do a certain kind of looking.
It's not just I'm seeing the thing, it's I'm noticing something as an action or a gesture or the way light behaves.
And that's when it doesn't have to be attached to something beautiful.
It just needs to something, it needs to be something that piques my interest enough when my index finger is listening to my brain, and that's it.
And I don't have to know why.
Like I'm not interested in the meaning of it.
I don't go out with a with a shot list or a desire to find this one person doing this one thing or an event.
It's more about there'll be some small action in the world and it it will it will grab me and I don't need to know anything else in the moment other than that's that's it.
Let's see how that let's let's see how that looks.
And it's that's your form of listening.
That's no form of listening with a camera.
There's I can have everything ready, I can be, you know, I'm I'm working with another photographer at the moment, and we're photographing together next to one another in a car.
And it's you realize that what you're seeing and what you're what your behavior when you're holding a camera and you're looking out into the world, when someone's right next to you, you do you you even you forget they're even there.
You forget you're in the car, you forget you're on the street, you forget which city you're in, all of that just slow dissolves around me.
And it's me and not even the camera.
I I I could be holding an ice cream tub.
There's me and my eyes and what I'm noticing, and that spark or that that piece of instinct, that that the intensity and the desire of it.
Because photography for me is all about want.
That it is just it is just like drenched in want.
Yeah.
It is, it's so lusty.
And it's the thing I want, I take, and then I start the process of looking again.
Tell tell me more about that because I want to come back to this um your your other c concept of beauty when you look at you know d damage and um simplicity and rust and and and you know this kind of um this the the objects that are that are broken almost um because it because of the comfort it gives you and this this connection to feeling safe.
So you take you get these images and you have this you know just in the flow state.
However, your process is with the camera and you're listening to yourself as well as to to what's appearing in front of you.
You get these images, then you basically rip them apart.
So then you're looking at you're going to the next phase and you're looking at these images.
Tell me about that part of looking and and if you can give us a little bit of an idea about that process.
I know it's different every time and with a with different sets of images, but you know, we could talk about I think I read or listened to you talk about um taking your your parents back to the family farm and putting the the the negatives on the soles of your feet as you walked around, right?
There's this I mean what a wonderful idea um and that it came out just inc just incredibly.
So is are you trying to think of something like that every time?
Or you know, tell me about how you go about this this part of looking once you've got the images.
Yeah, it depends entirely on the project I'm working on.
You know, in the case of constantly revisiting this family farm that's been now through seven or eight different transitions of ownership and is now abandoned, was that I I I have this love and love and um despair, I think, relationship with that place and that time.
I didn't want to leave it.
So I wanted terror.
I feel like terror is this like low hum that runs through all of my work.
There's some kind of terror of loss, terror of being slightly misplaced, terror of things that I that I love or that I'm in love with being away from me or me being left without these things.
And so in the case of the palm, I wanted that terror, I wanted that loss, I wanted the brokenness to be part of the work.
I wanted it to be invested inside the work.
It's one thing for me to make the work about the theme or about the topic.
It's quite another to take the own work that you have spent, in my case, more than 20 years making photographing at this place and then to actively destroy it.
Like that, that's it's perverse.
And then to ask my parents, except my elderly parents now who loved this place and lost it under the most, you know, dreadful measures, to ask them to return and go, oh, by the way, could you just go back, you know, once a month, every month for an entire year wearing these negatives that I have spent hours making, so that you can damage them just enough so that they look just forlorn enough and just broken enough to represent everything that I feel on the inside, put into material thinking on the outside, so that I can turn it into something that I can now admire as being more realistic as to what that felt like.
Not realistic of the place.
I mean, yes, any of us could go to this place with a camera and and make photographs of what it looks like.
But how it feels, I feel like I'm the only one who could have done that in collaboration with my parents, who were so generous as most parents one hopes are.
They would, of course, said, yes, of course, sweetie.
We'd love to help.
Well, my mum said that.
My dad was like, yeah, okay.
Yeah, we'll see.
So they go back and do this, they go back and do this thing and they keep, you know, my dad not so much now, but my mom would keep coming back.
She likes to revisit, she likes to see, you know, how things have changed.
I like to see how I have changed.
It's a great leveler and a great reminder of, you know, don't get too ahead of yourself.
Don't get too, don't think too highly of yourself.
Remember this is the place that in some ways made you and that you will always be tethered to.
And I never want to cut the tether.
I just want to destroy it just enough.
And not even so, it's pretty destroyed.
I just I remember Justine Kerlin, she said to me in a crit once, she said, the problem with these is that they're too beautiful.
And at the time I was outraged.
I thought, what do you mean they're too beautiful?
I'm like, oh, maybe they're too beautiful.
You know, maybe they need to be a little bit rougher.
And I loved it as feedback.
I thought, now that's terrific listening.
Like I'm really paying attention to the real estate of an image once it's been enlarged and framed and presented back to the world.
So you're looking for some way that you can connect these materials because you you treat foot the photographs just as a material, almost like a conduit to connect yourself with a specific emotion or to express that specific experience or emotion or or some kind of yeah, some kind of connec connection, I guess, is probably the best word for for that.
Yeah, absolutely.
I and I think that's in part because I I'm I'm a material thinker.
If I'm thinking about rope or wool or steel or metal or clay or whatever material is, I have to put it in my hands to be able to know it.
And my undergraduate degree was in painting.
And so you were constantly thinking about paint as being a material, a carrier, a conduit, um, a way of expression.
And I hated using a brush.
I felt the whole idea of using a brush was dumb.
I'm like, why can't I use my shoe to paint with?
Why can't I use something else entirely to be able to put this material on this surface?
Um, because I was constantly thinking about surface.
And that carried me through from being a painter and a poor painter.
I was crap at it.
My professor Peter very kindly took me aside in, I was in third year and said, You're not going to be a painter.
I mean, you can paint, but you are not a painter.
You're a photographer.
Here's a camera.
I'm like, yes, I'm familiar with one of these.
Um and so I went out and and I I made pictures, I made photographs of my entire final year uh exhibition because I couldn't wrestle with this material, this paint in the way that I wanted to.
It wouldn't behave, wouldn't stand still for me like the calves would stand still for dad.
And the camera's even worse.
Like I cannot wrestle film in the way that I want.
It's so tumultuous and naughty and like devilish.
And I love that about photography.
I love that it gives me the bird and says, here's what you want, Missy, and here's what I'm gonna give you.
And so we we we do this a little bit until like I'm moderately satisfied.
Um and I've continued that.
I've continued that ever since.
Yeah.
Now, when it comes to photography, the whole infrastructure of the internet rewards speed.
Post more, post faster, be first, be everywhere.
The algorithm doesn't care whether you went deep.
It cares whether you showed up yesterday.
And I guess that's not photography specific.
Now, for me, I built my work around a different bet that there are people who would rather go slowly and understand something fully than go fast and understand probably nothing.
That depth is not a liability, that the work you make when you take your time is categorically different from the work you make when you're chasing the feed, maybe, or chasing the algorithm.
Now, the Mood Insiders is built on that same bet.
It's a private community for photographers and visual artists who are serious about the slow work.
We have monthly masterclasses where we actually go deep on craft and thinking.
We have a weekly book club, monthly QA's.
We have the podcast, of course, but ad-free with bonus content, and we have direct access to me and my team.
It's not another newsletter you'll forget about, not a Discord server full of noise.
It's a room with a small number of serious people and a very clear and supportive focus.
It's just $19 a month.
The link is in the show notes, and I really hope I can see you inside.
Where did writing come into it then?
You know, as fast forward to we're gonna we're gonna go back and forth a little bit here in timeline wise, but it's fast forward to present day, and you know, I'm holding your your latest book isn't X Beautiful, which I I wanna definitely want to talk about now.
But you know, this is a novella of of sorts more like an you know autobiography essentially of your your time on the farm and as a child growing up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Why why write and what does writing do for you that photography can't?
Oh, well, I'll start with the first one because writing was I was never, I was never made to be afraid of writing.
Like a blank page was a place of potential and possibility.
It was never a place with a typewriter?
Mum with the typewriter and and writing letters or thank you cards or hand writing recipes, anything like that.
So it was never something to fear.
I remember when I'm I moved from one school, uh, a very small uh agricultural school, to a school in the town, a primary school.
We'd have to catch a bus two hours every day to go to school.
And my first day at school, I didn't have a place to sit.
And my teacher, Mrs.
Searle, gave me a um a sheet of paper and a pencil and said, Well, sit up the back and we'll sort you out with a desk.
I sat there for the next four hours and just wrote this random story.
I don't remember what the story was about.
But when I handed it to her before having to catch the bus, she said, Words will be important to you.
It's the only thing I ever remember her saying.
Words will be important to you.
Um I love to write because things that I don't feel warrant, not everything warrants a photograph.
And not everything that in that sits inside of me or circles around me needs to be a picture.
And the things that I latch on to and think about the most are things that I have read, things that have been said to me, things that I recall others saying, quotes from films, music lyrics.
Long form conversations, I doubt.
Long form conversations, Matt.
Those are the things that I will chew on for a really long time.
Photographs are very immediate and um and and some some will linger longer for sure.
But words penetrate in a different way.
And I like being able to revise.
There's a revision process that I can do with a sentence.
I can I can Zorrow a sentence down to its bare bones, I hope.
And so that it it it it doesn't just land somewhere.
It it it pierces.
I love a sentence that can pierce you, and you are quite happy to carry that little arrow because you don't want to pull it out and you don't want to band-aid it.
You want to feel it, and it comes with just a little bit of edge, a little bit of pain, a good kind of pain.
And that's what I love writing.
That's what I think writing can do that perhaps photography can't in the same way.
What a fantastic answer.
I've I've asked that question to so many people, and I think that's the best answer I've had.
Because I I agree with you, and I think it comes across, and we'll we'll talk about the meaning of X in a minute, but I don't want to give the whole book away.
Highly encourage everyone to go and buy this book, of course.
Um, I thought I'd just read from your website in terms of the kind of synopsis of this book, and then we'll we'll talk about you know what you just you mentioned there in terms of writing and what X means.
So this is what the um synopsis is.
Isn't X beautiful?
It's an autobiographical reckoning with family memory.
The fate of that plot of land and the history of photography are interwoven at every turn with the letter X.
A shadowy character, a placeholder for nothing and everything.
An age-old stand-in for the indefinable.
Teeming with free associative factoids, humor, and philosophical tangents.
This ten chapter tale is an extended meditation on the blind spots of personal narrative and the functions and limitations of photography in our personal and creative lives.
I think we've just kind of touched upon the limitations and functions of photography, but tell me more about the blind spots of personal narrative.
I don't really understand what that means, but maybe you can elaborate on how this book kind of t tells and explains a little bit about the blind spots of your personal narrative.
I think when you when I when I came to write this book, which didn't start out in the way that it ended up, as most good projects do, I started writing about the history of the letter X because it's it's such a cool character, right?
It's just it's like it's so great.
And I thought there has to be a relationship between the letter X and photography, and and as I discovered, there are all sorts of ways in which these things overlap.
But as I was writing it, the way that I often write is to go back to how I grew up, where I grew up, things that I paid attention to.
Because the way I paid attention before I was 15, I think is remarkably different to how I pay attention now.
Because what I had to pay attention to was so small, and things were constantly on repeat.
Stories were on repeat.
And I know the older I get, every time that I remember something from back then, there's something that will fall away, like a lopsy JPEG of my past that just falls away and I can't get it back.
I don't know what I'm losing, I can't retrieve it.
And I'm terrified of those things being away.
So as I'm writing and as I'm, oh, I remember this, I will get on the phone to my mom.
I will see if I make this, this is like that is a sign of age, right?
When you make this is the symbol for a phone.
Maybe you've got to do that as well.
Oh, and this.
Oh, and uh, yeah.
If anyone had a zero, and then I mean, oh, for goodness sake, I could go all the way around now.
All the way around, then you have to make that beautiful sound.
So as I'm recounting these things and calling my mum and and and we have these, they're not quite arguments, but she will remember one thing one way, I will remember it a different way.
My dad will step in and go, no, you've got it all wrong, and we'll give his recount.
Those are the kinds of things that are maybe not blind spots, but things that disappearing, have disappeared, have have shape-shifted along the way.
They're the shape-shifters.
I feel like the blind spots are the things that I just wasn't paying attention to, partly because of age, of interest, of where my focus and attention was at.
It, you know, there's only it's like when you carry a camera, you cannot see left or right or what's behind you.
You you can only see in the frame.
And even then, every time you get your negatives back or you're looking at your digital files, like, wait, that wasn't there.
I didn't see that.
How did that happen?
And we're looking at the smallest piece of the world from the the warehouse of forms that we could be paying attention to.
So it's all the things that probably just were, you know, swept away in the rear view as as the truck or the motorbike or whatever the mode of transport was that I was using for 15 odd years that I just that just passed me by.
How did you reconnect with them then?
Through images or through archives or through memory and all of the above?
All of the above, but mostly through photographs.
So I had to trawl through family photographs to be able to reconcile and almost prove, oh yes, that's how it looked, that's where it was.
And then you realize that the caption is written wrong, or that's not really Auntie Mary in the corner, it's Auntie Sylvia, and someone has recounted it entirely differently because that's the folly of memory.
We convince ourselves that something is true based on a memory or a photograph, and one or the other proves us wrong.
Storytelling proves us wrong.
And there's something delicious about going, you know what?
I think I'll remember the fiction.
I feel like every time we write a sentence about our past, there has to be fiction built into it because we can't possibly recount it exactly.
I don't think that's possible.
And good because the version that we're probably um giving away is probably just that bit shinier, that bit brighter, maybe that bit sadder than it really was.
Yeah.
Memory is an action.
Um in in the couple of lines in this book that uh I think you've just you you kind of threw in there as a as an exclamation mark.
Well, first of all, actually, while we talk about exclamation marks, why what's the intent of using the exclamation mark after the tit you know, the end of the title rather than maybe a question mark or no exclamation?
You're trying to make a statement here, it seems.
I was trying to reference what Auntie Sylvia, who was also the midwife who helped my mum when she was giving birth, said because I didn't have a name for I think two or three days.
And mum wanted to call me Sharon, was it I forget what it was now, Mary Ann.
And but my cousin was Sharon Ann.
And my dad had grave reservations about that.
So I was, I just had a little card with a letter X on it above the crib in the hospital.
And Auntie Sylvia came in when the first photograph was made of me and said, Oh, isn't X beautiful?
And the way she says it to me with that like the line of the tone was an exclamation point.
And kind of funny.
Like I can picture her saying it in a way she's like, Oh, isn't X beautiful?
as if to say, give her a name for the love.
Yeah, just sarcasm through the whole sentence almost.
Um yeah, because you you talk about the you know, the the fact that X is, you know, goes back to that moment of of birth, but it seems to be prevalent.
It's funny when you kind of distill so many moments in your life to this this uh shape, essentially, this one arbitrary just feature in this thing that we call alphabet, but it seems to have appeared uh so much in your life.
Um and I feel like reading this you didn't necessarily insert meaning where it wasn't you know uh apparent or hadn't presented itself to you.
So I think there's kind of this uh really weird and um serendipitous kind of relationship you have with this letter.
It's it's kind of romantic in a way.
But um, you know, we we think about uh photography, a couple of couple of sentences like that kind of bookend the book, I think, if that makes any sense.
The f the first one is is really early on and uh it kind of caught my attention.
You say I try to imagine myself as a camera and realize I've been one since opening my eyes.
I'll ask you to kind of explain that a little bit, but I think it pairs with this this other sentence that you is a little bit more personal, I guess.
Grandpa once said that the camera was a prism, but it occurs to me only now I may have heard prism in place of prison, which was very, very interesting.
I mean, think about those two sentences that that you wrote kind of at each end of the book.
Um I'd love for you to explain, try and explain each one and the kind of connected connective tissue in between without us going through the whole book.
Well, opening my eyes, I feel like you there's it's one thing to see.
And I remember doing some research about just the act of seeing and how many words there are in English to describe the act of seeing, of which there's more than 170.
You know, there's noticing, there's witnessing, and everything in between.
There's more than 170 words for the verb to explain, to see, to look, to notice, to witness, to observe.
And I found that entirely fascinating because it also feels like it's related to attention.
Like we can, you can, and that's why I use the analogy in the book.
You can open the refrigerator and go, I can't find the cheese.
Well, the cheese is front and center, you know, it's like it's right there.
Is that there are things that are right in front of us, but we're not paying attention.
It doesn't mean we're not looking and we're not seeing, we're just not paying attention to what is what is there and and what we're connecting to in that act of looking.
And so I, you know, I often think of us as being like cameras because we're seeing things, we're noticing things, we're recording them.
It doesn't mean that we're recording every single instance to re-look at, because photography is also a process of a re-look.
There's you have the first look and the making of the thing that you have looked at, but then there's the looking at that comes after that when time has moved on and you've moved on and things have changed, the conditions under which you are looking have changed.
And it's that condition of looking, I think, that I was referring to about we we see pictures, we we see the world, and then we see photographs in the world.
And if you ask any photographer, I bet they will have a catalog of photographs that they have seen that they did not take, they wish they had taken, but that make a better photograph because it wasn't taken, because the way they remember it is far juicier and lusher, and you know, it's got its legs and arms wrapped around it in a way that it's only possible because it's not a photograph, because it's not a flat dead print.
It's not a flat dead something that you go back and look at.
And I think that's what I was thinking about in this idea of like looking white, like coming into the world, opening your eyes, you're like, you're ready as a camera.
It doesn't mean that you are actively spitting out a photograph.
Again, it's that concept of listening.
You know, it's noticing is just the visual version of listening, right?
And actually paying attention to what you're observing.
So I think that's um really profound.
And I think that's the start or an essential ingredient of having a voice.
And I you know, I hate to throw the kind of a cliche term like voice in there, but you know, if I was to look at you as an artist and what you've what you've created over the years as well as what you're still doing, I think Well, Adette really has a strong voice, whether that's like a personal voice or more of like an an activist voice for some for some other types of photographers and artists.
Where does that did you ever think like that?
Was it, you know, I've got something to say here and I want to go and say it, or is it just kind of like falling into these, you know, I feel like you know, I w I want to try something here and curiosity here and see what comes of it?
I I'm the reason I'm asking that is A, I'm interested, but also, you know, a lot of emerging photographers out there, this is where they struggle the most, right?
They really like they can take good photos, but uh, if they have something to say, and if they have something to say, have they articulated it with those photos?
So how did that happen with you?
I get asked a lot by students of mine too.
Like, I, you know, do I have something to say?
How do I say what I want to say?
Does what I want to say matter?
Hasn't someone else said it before?
Yeah, better, isn't it?
Grander.
And my response is always, but there's the way you tell your story that no one else has told.
No one has made the pictures you make, no one has used the words in the sentence as the way you've crafted them.
Maybe it looks similar or sounds similar to someone else, but this has come from you.
And the like the extension of that, and certainly for myself, is that the more like truly vulnerable and sincere and honest you can be with yourself as a person and as an artist, assuming those two things are like this, but they're probably more like, I don't know what shape they are, the more, the more you can do that, the richier your work will be, regardless of what it is, regardless of what you're saying, who you're trying to say it to, whatever your message is.
I I couldn't tell you in one sentence what my message is, but I can tell you that I'm always happy to throw the muck of my life out into the world.
I care not about revealing anything.
It's wholly available.
I am very willing to be to say the things certainly about myself that someone will read and go, why would she tell anyone that?
It seems so personal, so private, so weird, so stupid.
It's like, yes, but you know what?
The stories that we love, if we think of, if you think about the catalogue of music, films, story, anything where you are hearing about the lives of others, what are the ones that you like the best?
And it's usually where someone has been broken, forlorn, terribly vulnerable.
You're like, oh, did I see that?
Did I read that?
Wow, I need to get closer, let me have a good look at that.
Well, but oh.
And when you are willing to um be really, really honest about what motivates you and what you care about, that's what will make whatever you are working on far more relatable because it can only come from you.
It can only have your twist on it, your spin on it, your opinion of it.
I think that's the most genuine thing for the artist to be, not to produce, not to make, not even to think about production, but just to be.
And by being, I mean knowing yourself enough.
Say, here's what I'm comfortable with, here's what I'm good at, here's what I can put forward, here's what I can offer, and and close out everything else.
Be aware and reference things and read things and devour the world as much as you can.
There's so much to devour, but also to stay resonant to what feels most um that completes the completes part of you that can only come out in the act of making and making something.
Yeah, there's almost two facets in in starting that journey.
I always used to think, well, you've got to know yourself so well because if you don't know yourself, you don't know what you care about, you don't know where to point the camera or to put the pen or whatever it might be.
And you end up just chasing your tail all the time.
But even if you know yourself really well, you have to have a level of braveness, right?
It's it's one thing you know, being honest with yourself inside, but it's another thing going, right, you know, I'm brave enough to put this out into the into the world now.
Um and sometimes, you know, it doesn't quite resonate, but uh you know, you you look at the best artists in the world and and that is a common thread, right?
That is uh they have the vulnerability and they have the braveness to put that vulnerability out there.
So um how where did that Wh was there a seminal moment?
Where I mean there never is a seminal moment, but in you know, a d a a kind of timeline or uh or at rough age that you were it kind of clicked for you, or you understood what your mission was in that sense and your purpose was with a camera and with writing in that sense, or did you just kind of wake up 20 years later and go, oh yeah, I kind of I've got my message out of this?
No, I you know, on the I'm I'm the biggest contradictor of myself ever.
I I I I get out of bed and go, right, time to play, time to have fun, also time to work.
Um I am the least confident individual in my own work and practice, but I do it because I love it and I do it for me.
I have to I have to revolve around the sun that says, I am making this first and foremost to satisfy something within.
I don't have to know exactly what it will be.
I'm gonna make a shit ton of failure, and I have made buckets of it, drawers of it, archive boxes of crap that have come to nothing.
Like absolutely I have a studio that is full of failed projects.
And every now and then I will go into, I now call them my box of potentials because I feel like like calling them box of failures all the time doesn't feel very good.
So my box of potentials, I go in there and I will rustle around because I keep it all.
If I, if I if I have it available to me, I can reach back into it and go, hey, that thing wasn't so bad.
Maybe I had to make some stuff in order to get to something else.
I think too often as artists, we we want something to come out well considered, well articulated, that the context, the structure, everything is good.
You know, everything is finer.
It's it's like the Instagram post mentality.
I have to craft this just right, get the pictures right, get all my language right, and then it dunked it's out there.
Good.
Our making is not that process for me.
And I don't think it should be that process necessarily that we aspire to either.
Like being an artist is hard.
Making stuff is hard.
We're so good at talking our talking ourselves out of things.
Too cold, too hungry, too tired, too this, too that.
It's really difficult to go, no, I can do this thing.
I'm gonna make this thing.
And even if it sucks, I'm gonna make it anyway because it will teach me something.
You just you have to, you you keep making, you keep making.
And you expect nothing.
I expect nothing and I make everything.
How often do you uh this is a rhetorical question because I think we both know the answer, but how often do you you make something and it fail, but not fail in the sense that you've learned something or taken a taken something away from it.
You never make something and consider it a complete, well, I'm you know, failure, that's going in the bin, that was a complete waste of my time.
Never, never happens.
So yeah, we we're so good at talking ourselves out of everything.
And what if this and what if that, and I don't know what to say, and I don't know what to shoot, and I don't know this, and you know, we've all we all do it, right?
But I think it's you know, I think about this with exercise or with meditation or with reading, whatever it might be.
It's like, okay, I've just got to get through the first 30 seconds.
As soon as I start, I'm fine, right?
And it's like, oh, can I be bothered to do this?
Can I be bothered to do that?
Yeah.
We're so lazy and we like a quick fix and we like things to be immediate.
And like the the best tangible example that I can give you right now, I bought myself quite intentionally one of these desk calendars.
And you're supposed to rip the sheets off each day.
So instead of doing that, I started writing.
I set myself a writing task every day.
Before I would go to bed, I would have to write and fill this like little A5 sheet of paper with just thoughts from the day, like a sentence, a half sentence, and I would fill it up in pencil, and I am still doing it.
Um, but I called it my daily sentence.
And I thought it was the dumbest thing that I was doing because I wasn't doing it with the purpose of making a thing.
I was doing it as an exercise because writing to write well to write, you need to be doing that shit every day, every single day.
So I write something every day.
And then it's it's it turned into, I started rereading things and went, whoa, this is this sentence is great.
Everything else around it, dreadful.
And then it's it's turned into something else.
So it's you don't even have to come at something by thinking I'm making art or I'm making a book or I'm making a project.
As soon as we call it project, as soon as we call it book, we all know what we're talking about, and we're somehow weakening its structure.
And we're giving it, you know, we're giving it a format and a purpose, and it doesn't need any of that.
You can just do something and have it be done for the sake of doing.
It's that thing that Zadie Smith said.
Why are you doing this?
I'm doing it for something to do.
And that can be enough.
I'm doing it for something to do.
I love that.
Yeah, I think we're comfortable of thinking like that as photographers with our own images.
It's like, yeah, I like these images.
Don't and then you try to like insert meaning and story and narrative in in them, and you then you start putting pressure and I can't figure it out, and I don't know what the artist statement is, and I don't know what this project is.
What am I gonna say about it?
And I don't even know if it works, and the cohesion is not there, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Which we all go through, of course.
Um, and sometimes you just gotta take your foot off the gas pedal and just go, whoa, there's these, these are just this is just me.
This is there's no you know, to take the pressure off a little bit, this is just what I made.
Just what I made.
So let me know what you think, kind of thing.
Um would you I mean, I hate to put you on the spot like this, would you would you be willing to share any of your daily sentences or are they too too private?
No, I so I started like most of my things, they transitioned from the my calendar to a notebook.
Um, I'm always putting things in a book.
And in this case, I'm sticking uh photographs um next to the daily writing.
So I've I've typed it out and is this what you posted on um socials the other week?
Yeah, I I love to look at that.
I'm very, very interested.
Is this the next I don't want to say the word project, but is this the next thing that you are kind of making?
It's it's one of three.
So I I I I'm always working on multiples.
I have three things.
I'm I've got a collaborative project with another photographer.
That's one.
The second thing is a image-based retelling of Susan Sontag's book on photography, which is all writing, no pictures.
And the third thing is this daily sentence.
So I I can read you a couple.
Um so here's you never walk into the same photograph twice.
Even conflict sits inside tenderness.
How a day can hinge on a question or a smile.
Close your eyes because the world is sometimes nicer when you do.
Ouch.
Some pain in that always pain and terror, man.
I can't write anything good or photograph anything good if there isn't pain, loss, terror, damage, some form of damage attached to it.
I've uh, you know, I need to be, I'm Wednesday's child.
Like I was born on a Wednesday.
She's full of woe.
You know, she's full of woe.
It's my it's the other favorite thing.
I, you know, lover of home, full of woe.
Why?
Do you know why that you know arguably obviously we think about any type of uh heroine or hero story or you know, the most famous?
There's pain in there.
There's there's almost there's always some pain that we have the the subject has to resolve and overcome.
But what is it about you and your your life that you feel like that's always something that you are just drawn back to all the time or interested in or you know connected with in terms of that emotion and the the the complexities of pain and and hope and damage.
I think if there's lost it means that love has happened.
And I love the idea that something deep and connective and beautiful has occurred and to make you to make you appreciate it something has had to go awry.
And that there's that the awryness is I think my whether it's upbringing or or just personal preference, I have to feel that the distance from the experience of having something being so right and true and and and and beautiful and sound to being something where the almost the opposite or there's there's an extremity of opposition to that because it fuels it fuels my mind, it fuels my body to create in a way that something that's loving and and delightful just doesn't.
Is that terrible?
No, because the the result of what comes out of that is is you know, by definition, it is beautiful.
And it and it's you know, I talk about I was do I was doing um I have a private community and we we we talk about this concept of everyone talks about uh this word art and beauty and storytelling and all these kind of buzzwords that get thrown around.
No one really understands the meaning of them, but you basically just defined the meaning of art and you define the meaning of beauty because it's so inherent within you, and actually you've just using it, like you said, as fuel to give something that's beautiful to a portion of the world who can connect with it and can empathize with it, can understand it.
And that is the act of you know, beauty in art.
That is that is everywhere it is.
So um it's not terrible at all.
It sounds though like you use that almost as a coping mechanism, or you sorry, you use your art and that what you make out of it as a coping mechanism for the the awry and the the the damage that you are trying to to unpack, which in itself is is beautiful.
And what a privilege that we have the skills or the the artistic integrity to have something like photography and writing to make sense of that and to to cope with it.
And um I think that's why you you do it in such a great way, because it that's just who you are.
Um but you you the what you read out to me was so beautiful, and I'm gonna get the I'm gonna do kind of cut that bit out, the transcript of this conversation.
But you you said conflict it was it conflict inside tenderness?
What what I'm pretty stupid when it comes to these types of things.
But t tell me more about what you mean by that.
I think conflict inside tenderness.
I can't even remember what I was thinking about when I wrote it.
I think I think being tender and being gentle are very similar.
And I had read a book on gentleness and that this gentleness is something that should underpin how we live.
It was a it's it was it's a theory book, it's beautiful.
Um but to to feel or to express tenderness usually well, I don't know.
Now I'm gonna question myself, does it mean there has to have been conflict as part of that?
It's that conflict is resolved through tenderness, but tenderness can only exist because of conflict?
I don't know.
It seems to make sense, and I will probably spend the next few weeks trying to make sense of it, but I think it's a beautiful saying.
So I really want to kind of understand it more.
Um but moving forward, without putting you on the spot all the time, tell me, um, you mentioned your so you're working on three things at the moment.
First of all, um that's beautiful.
I love the the I guess not the contrast, but the the the complementing of a of an image with your um your daily sentence or a thought.
You know, I I love I love the idea.
And um yeah, I'm interested to see how how that comes out and when it comes out.
But you the second thing you said you're working on is this um actually what did you say?
It was something to do with Susan Sontag's on photography?
You you're breaking it down or you're diving into it.
How what is tell me more about it?
I have I I was introduced to this book as an undergraduate painting student, and I've read it numerous times since.
It's um, you know, Susan Sontag writing all about photography.
But what struck me about the book is that she refers to photographs.
She talks about snapshots, she talks about vernacular photography a lot.
There's not a single image in that book, not one.
Fair Jew, she was a writer and she wrote a lot about photography among other subjects.
The book turns 50 next year, and there was the Folio Society brought out a version of it in 2022 where they had picked out 20 or 24 photographs by, you know, really famous photographers to illustrate alongside Sontag's words.
But the bulk of her writing in that book is about everyday photography.
And so I wanted to do a retelling of it where rather than it being about the words, it's just full of everyday photography.
Okay.
That sh that sort of through the pictures almost tells the story of Suntag's essays that appear in that book.
So I worked with the Peter J.
Cullen collection in New York and spent the day with Peter and with Carly, his assistant, going through thousands of photographs, everyday pictures that don't have a home or have a home in this collection to try and match them to each page of Susan Suntag's book.
So I had to read and reread and reread each page and find parts of sentences.
I started removing parts of the text, covering it up, redacting parts of the text.
And so it's it's it's going to be a retelling, but through by the means by which she wrote about every day, everyday, ordinary, extraordinary photographs.
Does it I'm trying to work out in the way that you're talking about this, is you resonate with Sontag's books and essays, or you is there some kind of disagreement there or kind of um rebellion against what the the way she talked about photography and her ideas around it?
Yeah, and less rebellion and more how much I didn't realize until you break down a book page by page, and you're really thinking about the language that is used to describe things, of course, when you know things that are written five years ago seem so different, let alone something that was written 50 years ago.
What was remarkable to me is how little things have changed in the world of photography from 50 years ago.
Yes, there's been a lot of change, but the what the kinds of things that Susan Suntag was writing about and the way she was writing about them, as I was reading, I thought, wow, that seems to be the same.
That seems to be the same.
A lot of the points that she was making as I was redacting the text down to like one or two sentences per page, bear in mind this is, you know, it's a very subjective way of reading someone else's text, breaking one page by page down to just a sentence or two.
How much foresight she had, how much crystal balling there seemed to be that was absolutely spot on.
And she was she was an avid reader, like she ate books.
So she she was really well informed about what she was writing, but just how extraordinary it is for 50 years ago, for point after point, to still be on point about photography.
Um and it was that's when I thought, okay, if I'm going to retell this, I I have no business messing around with these words because I don't think there's anything I can add to them.
What's missing is the visual representation of the things that she had written about.
And can I use everyday pictures by everyday people to some not necessarily illustrate, but to um maybe indicate toward the kinds of things that she was trying to say in each of those, you know, five or six essays?
Was there anything that she wrote that you you do vehemently disagree with?
I mean, something that comes to top of my I mean, she talked about um to photograph someone is to violate them, right?
Which she had she had some darkness to to her writing.
Was there anything you know, anything that springs to mind that you just completely disagree with what she was saying?
Probably more so in her journals, actually, that um that her son that her son published um uh you know a a good many years later, I would read them and think, wow, no, that's not the case, or I disagree, or less so in on photography, at least.
Yeah.
But they're they're great essays to work through to think about how they apply to your practice and go, oh, do I think like that?
Do I see like that?
Is that still is that relevant to me?
Is it still relevant to the way people photograph?
Um yeah, and every time I I mean, it's like any book, I think.
Anytime you dive into it, um, depending on what you're working on, what you've read or consumes in the meantime, changes your perspective on things for sure.
A short note before we close.
For a while now, the first thing I've done most mornings before the camera or any other work or before the coffee, before the endless tabs, is sit 10, 20, 30 minutes just watching the noise inside my head do what noise does.
It hasn't just made me calmer in the way people imagine, it's made me more honest, more mindful, more compassionate, and more free in more ways than I could even describe.
And that honesty and introspective clarity, more than any lens, workshop, or book, is really what changed my photography.
The work I make now comes from a quieter place with more clearness and calmness.
I notice what I'm reaching for, and I notice when I'm reaching for the wrong thing.
The inner critic still talks, still exists.
I just don't believe everything he says anymore.
The app I've used for most of this is Waking Up by Sam Harris.
It's the one tool I've genuinely kept returning to all this time.
This is not a paid sponsorship from them.
However, I am an affiliate partner, and for good reason, I believe that this app is worth it more than any other.
What's kept me there for years is that it's not just one thing, is a guided daily meditation, which is the spine of it for me, but there are also short daily reflections, a daily quote that tends to do its own quiet work in the background, and these little moments, they call it, of awareness you can drop into during the day.
Two-minute resets when the head starts running.
There's also an entire library of guest series with teachers I'd never have found on my own, and a lot more besides that.
It keeps the practice alive instead of letting it calcify into routine.
So a link sits in the show notes for a free 30-day trial and 20% discount on their subscriptions.
If you want the longer story, though, of how meditation reshaped my work, there's also a piece linked through my Substack page called There's No Self-Development Without Self-Awareness.
Anyway, hope you enjoy.
Thanks for listening.
Do you recommend uh I mean, tell me more about your teaching, I guess, because you have an influence in your position, um, you know, teaching students photography and and how do you recommend um or what do you recommend, should I say?
Do you recommend people like Susan Santelle that people need to go and read and study?
And tell me more about your teaching role, what that encompasses, how it started, and your your stance, I guess, on what you like to impart on learning photographers.
Yeah, uh so I started teaching in 2013, 2014.
I had a tenure track job at the University of South Australia, and I was teaching five intro and intermediate digital photography courses.
This is after I'd done my MFA.
And I loved it.
But the very first teaching experience I had was as an under was as a graduate student at RISD.
They let me pro I proposed and they let me teach for the very first time a student to propose a course in the photo department called Interrogating Snapshots.
And we looked at the history of snapshot photography.
And I just, I loved it.
I got so much out of it because I I don't think you can teach without learning alongside your students.
And I don't think you I don't think as a teacher you claim to know everything, let alone anything.
You claim to be a great listener and a great mediator of what a student is trying to articulate.
Your job there is not to tell people what to do.
So many students will say, What's it, what do I do next?
Like that's not my job to tell you what to do next.
My job is for us to have a conversation where you, a three-way conversation.
There's you and the me, and there's the work.
And the three of us are going to talk through what you're thinking.
How did this come into being?
And to find a way forward.
And for me to ask guiding questions that might lead you to a next step, not a forward step, because moving forward is not necessarily something that has to happen either.
Maybe it's a different kind of movement that has to happen.
Maybe it's finished.
Maybe it's something else has to happen.
Maybe there's a a a wait time.
Maybe, you know, it has to go into hibernation for a bit.
You or the work, you know?
What kind of questions would you be asking then?
You know, obviously you can't give specifics because it depends on every individual, but this can be a ballpark in terms of what we could be asking ourselves.
You know, a photocritique's a perfect.
Kind of petri dish of what happens there.
You have 20 minutes with O'Dea England and what what what kind of questions are you asking to help the photographer or the student ideate or as well as articulate what their how this came about and so understand what their next step might be.
Yeah, I think in a like in a critique situation when I'm with a group of students is very different to if I'm doing a 20-minute review one-on-one because I'm also very aware of time.
It's my least favorite thing.
Like I love doing them, but 20 minutes just isn't enough.
I much prefer like the two, three-hour studio visit with a student where I get to the privilege of being inside their space because it is their space.
It's a private space.
Whether it's a studio, a bedroom, a kitchen, down the coffee shop, like this is a space where we're engaging with their vulnerability, having created something and wanting to seek some form of feedback or some kind of reconciliation with what comes next, if anything.
What were you looking at?
What were you looking for?
What did you notice at the time that you made it?
And what do you notice now that's different in the work?
I often ask, depending on the work, you know, uh point out to me where where's the critical thing inside this work that you could not live without this this work can't exist without this thing?
What is the thing inside this work?
Is it its entirety?
Is it this subject?
Is it the quality of shape, shadow, light, texture?
Is it how you felt in the environment that you were in?
Like, was there a feeling around it?
And that's separate to the photograph.
Um, and I'm thinking specifically via photography.
If I was asking about sculpture or needlework or jewelry or metalsmithing, I might ask different questions.
Yeah.
Um fascination.
I'm curious what people are motivated by um to even make the photograph.
Like, why a photograph for this?
And did you move over here or did you move over here?
Or how long were you here?
Like, how long were you in this the vicinity of this picture coming into being?
Who was with you?
Um, so that I can understand how how it's how born.
So I can't understand how something was born and how it arrives into the world if I don't know the conditions that sit around it.
And it's oftentimes when a student will say, Can I record this conversation?
I'll say yes, because you will say things in the description of your process, because your process is so important to the creation of the thing, and you'll forget.
Or you won't even be paying attention to what you're saying because you're so busy thinking through answering the question, wanting to sound smart and like you you know what you're doing.
My favorite thing is when someone has no clue.
Like, brilliant.
Let's enter the fog together.
Like, let's sit in that beautiful fog.
We don't have to have the exact answer.
No.
Yeah.
Wonderful.
Uh I'm asking myself all those questions now.
So um I will we're running out of time.
So we'll we'll we'll wrap up, but I'm kind of interested to end on the future, I guess, of photography and you know, you teaching students.
Um I'm interested in to hearing what you observe is coming through, if anything different, and how how the youngsters and the Gen Z generation and those that are going through photography school and university, whatever it might be, are looking at photography as a whole, but also as a profession and you know, throw in AI and you know, digitization, homogenization, and you're packing everything into short form content or a single image and all of the challenges that we have of visual artists today.
Just please tell me your thoughts on how photographers move forward, but especially those emerging ones that are still learning the craft and are looking at it in the future and kind of, I guess, worried about it, or at least concerned about how they navigate that territory.
Yeah, I have students of all ages and all stages of their careers.
So I have students who are in their 20s, in their 30s, students who have come straight out of high school.
I have students who have come back to an institution having been out in the workforce doing all kinds of jobs.
I have students who are in their 60s or 70s who are retired or semi-retired and had wanted to be in the arts in some way.
And each of their perspectives, their worries for the most part, what they're motivated by, what they're concerned with are different.
The one thing that unites them all is their lack of trust and faith in what they express and how they express it through picture making or through their writing.
And it goes back to our earlier conversation point on this is that there's apprehension and there's doubt.
And I my own practice often starts with a sense of doubt, you know, this this not knowing, and we don't like not knowing.
And we don't know how to get out of a cycle of not knowing or not feeling confident.
And what we need wrapped around us is the thing that's also being denied of us so often through technology or other means is connection to another human being.
It seems so elementary and so simple, but the difference between sitting with a student for five minutes or 50 minutes and talking to them, it doesn't even have to be a s a formal student.
You know, I'm doing some work at the local darkroom here, and people want to have a sense of confidence in their skill.
They know they have the skill, but it's very different when someone else ratifies that and makes you feel good.
Because when we feel good or whatever our interpretation of good is, we can do.
And that's the thing that is regardless of age, where one is studying, what they are studying within the visual arts, or even if it's not visual arts, that seems very, very present, prevalent and concerning.
That there's not enough um care and attention to the act of helping others feel like they can create safely, studiously, intermittently.
Well, it having had that kind of a microcosm of your support and your um your empathy with uh other people trying to make um some kind of art from from themselves, I uh I can certainly agree with uh with you talking like that as well as your part to play in that.
So how can how can if people want to um learn from you, do you offer, I mean, or without going to school, do you offer any private mentorship?
Is there where can people find you or and connect with you?
Is that something that you you offer?
Yeah, so I haven't done any private mentorship, but I often teach outside of I teach at the Rhode Island School of Design and at Brown University.
And when I'm not there, I am at scenes like the Chico Review, where you and I met, or I teach for the LA Center for Photography as well.
I there's lots of short-form courses that I've been involved with um over the years, but people can just reach out to me too with questions.
I I still get questions from so many Chico participants this year saying, hey, ask you about this grant or this opportunity, or can you take a look at this PDF?
Or and that's the way it should be.
And we should because we're all in that stage or phase at some point throughout our careers, I hope.
I have a little group of people that I'm always sending something to, like, take a look at this.
That's how you grow, is by being available.
If we can't be generous to others in that mean, then I don't know what we're doing.
You know, we we shouldn't even be on this planet if we're not doing that.
Well, unfortunately, a lot of those types of things are very well gatekeeped with so many.
So um kudos to you for breaking down those barriers and thank you for being the uh the figure in this industry that we desperately need and that we can um really learn a lot from and and take massive inspirations from, uh, myself included.
So Odette, thank you so much for being who you are and also just being on this uh chat with me.
It's been an absolute honour and and privilege.
And hopefully we can meet again in person uh another day where I can show you my own work and hopefully you'll you'll uh you'll be impressed with it.
But we'll see.
I would I would love that.
It's five my next favorite thing next to teaching or being involved with others is just looking at work.
What an extraordinary thing that you get to, you know, that we get to look at pictures and just chat about them.
It's wonderful.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's kind of um it's just a luxury, isn't it?
But uh It is.
Yeah, well I've been looking at your images for many years, and I will continue to do so and keep an eye out for those three projects you've got coming up.
So um until until then, thank you so much, Edette.
And I I wish you all the best.
And I hope you get some rest after your travels, and uh I look forward to chatting with you again soon.
Thank you.
Right back to you.