Odette England Answers Every Photographer's Worst Fear, E126

There's some kind of Tara of loss, Tara of being slightly misplaced.

“Tara of things 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 ex-beautiful, is an autobiographical reckoning with family, memory, and everything photography can and cannot hold. Photography for me if it is to range still won't. 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 sent in my case.

More than 20 years of making photographing at this place and then to actively destroy it. Like 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, reach your work or 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 of most photographers try to keep out of the frame.

This conversation is about beauty, memory, finding a voice and why Odette says you're most broken parts of the ones that are really worth showing. I love broken things, the lawn things, rusty things, I like things that are brown and yellow. My one of that terror, I one of that loss, I one of the brokenness to be part of the work. There's something that will fall away, like a lossy JPG 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 away. 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 that has to have been conflicted as part of that?”

Odette, what an honor it is to have you on the move podcast. Thank you for taking a time to jump online with me today. I'm so happy to be here and so excited. Thank you for the invite. Yeah, you're very welcome and we met in person from a review, you gave me a cheeko in this kind of how we started contact really, but I've been a big fan of yours for a few years now and we're going to jump into my interest in your work and your books, obviously, and what kind of sparked my interest.

But 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 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 podcast. But Odette means lover of home, correct? 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 that he

used to use for naming all the calves that were born at the farm and so the calves had extraordinary

names that had a first name, a middle name, and a surname. And when he was naming my brother and

die, he was looking through this baby's names book and came across a debt and thought, oh, that's love like his mum and dad are Colin and Helen and they wanted something a bit more interesting. You know, or something a little less ordinary and it was, I was probably in my early studies when I found out what my name meant and I was, I was like, oh, this makes sense, this is me.

“What are the names were in the book that he might have called you?”

Oh, pictures were definitely one of them, Nazareth. Yeah, I think he was going in sort of, you know, alphabetical order and trying to find the most, you know, a taste name that he possibly could. But pictures and Nazareth were two of them, I forget some of the others. They were dreadful. So, so you said it's, you know, as a perfect name for you, what is, give us a little bit of a history about your home that you talked about being raised on a farm

and having a lot of kind of resonance with the lifestyle of being on a farm and that, you know,

Give me a bit more of an explicit description of how you were brought up as a child

on a farm in Australia. Yeah, so the dairy farm that I grew up in was,

“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 acres dairy farm 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 what dubious access to television,

we had two newspapers that would come, one was the stock journal, so you could read about cows and paints and horses and we didn't have too many books. 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 were outdoors fixing something, raising something, grows at growing something,

you were, or working, you were doing the other kind of work in which we're sitting around a table,

and sharing a story, or listening to a story. And the community that I grew up in was very a male dominant, there were very few women, the women who were there with farm as 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 quite a faith-based religious community, almost everyone went to church across the river on the Rickardy old ferry every Sunday. And everyone knew everyone's business. If you

did not know when the inside of someone's farmhouse looked like, there was something wrong. I still

“remember people's refrigerators, the fridge magnets that people had, you just knew everyone's”

face. And so you knew everyone's lives, and lives styles, and it was just a given that you were in each other's lives. So there was good parts to that, and somewhat maybe not so good parts to that. You didn't have privacy. Yeah. In order to do need it, because you didn't, why would you need that, of course? I didn't even think about caring about it. It's just not at all. Sorry to cut away from the episode from in it, 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 so serious about the work you did it alone, you'd consume enough, watching enough, reading 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 inside us. It's a place where the work”

is taken seriously, where you can bring your questions, and of course your hard-finished ideas, and where someone would actually engage with them. We have the ad-free extended podcast episodes with bonus content, we have monthly Masterclasses, Q&A sessions, and of course the weekly book clubs, and 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 just yesterday,

you know, this concept of memory is very, very interesting to me, and I think you really work on

of people's fridge is, or it's a small community, but how did the storytelling and your memory

of this come into it? Do you think they're intertwined, memory is a story, and it's our storytelling, and it's self, I've heard you talk about that like that before. When the kind of makes sense, when you introduce it like that, but I'm interested now to the storytelling side of images, and there's one thing telling stories around a campfire, where did the photography side of things come in, and how were you introduced to it in regards to the storytelling and memory collision?

Yeah, oh, collision is such a good word, because it does feel like a collision. They think it's heat you and bounce off you. I think there were two main modes, the farmers' wives were responsible for making pictures of their children, but in a very just Greek inexpensive way, because film was expensive, it was expensive to buy, it was expensive to process, and you might have four roles of film a year, because when you when got a process, you'd have to drive it all the way into the

town, and then go and pick it up 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 September, because

“that's how long it took you to fill a 36-year-old film, and it was the wives' job, and therefore,”

the daughters' job to write captions. My mum had a beautiful blue-weremington 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 for-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 care taking, it wasn't that it was just a recording of what kids and family was like, or birthed that, because it was all around events, Easter's birthdays, Christmas's, another day, Father's Day, all these kind of official events. All when you went for a big fishing trip, a fishing trip banning a day down at the river,

and you caught 20 fish, and then no fish would be lined up, and you would present the objects

to the camera, was this presentation mode. So there was that, and then the second part was

photography is work. All of the farmers photograph their carbs every spring, and so they would

“wrestle, and that's how my book isn't ex-beautiful starts in chapter one. It's me recounting this story”

of my dad, making photographs of carbs, wrestling them into a 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 Essex 70 Polaroid 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 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. Well, that I'm so jealous of that. Excellent. I'm sure it was as fun as that all the time, but I've heard you also talk about never wanting history to let go of you, and I feel like there's that document-tiv side of you that, you know, photography as a utility, photography as a document, photography as an object, or a photograph as 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 this is 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 that 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

“the curiosity that you have with your own mind and how you remember things? I think it's both,”

I like testing myself to see what I can and can't remember, and I think by virtue of the way I

the male farmer, and certainly around the table storytelling, you know, we used our senses

sort of in the quantity bestowed, it was two years, two hours one now, and so I was 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 and 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, 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 work, but you play it 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, when teas 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 knock

the cows twice a day, so we never went on holiday, but I got to play an experience life without the worry or stress of anything that wasn't immediate. The cows are out, oh, we fix it. The electricity is 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 have experienced it had I've been an adult. So there's”

the romance of the time, there's the romance of being a child, and then a teenager, and 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 care take me 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 leave.

If we don't grow the same, we have nothing to eat, we don't. Very different. Lots of big lessons I'm sure really carried you well in adulthood, but a lot of, I guess I'm more interested in the things that you may have been protected from, or certainly the way

“women were treated in that area at that time, you must have gone out into the world, as a young”

woman and just got water. How do I survive? Where do I go? What do I do? Can I speak? I'm interested in, was photography a part of your life then when you're leaving home and how did it evolve more in terms of creating that, or refining that voice that you inevitably were going to have?

Yeah, at the time, I was always sculpting things, and I didn't appreciate that until I went to

art school years and years later. I wouldn't make things out of wire. When we were fishing, there was this beautiful clay 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 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 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 pasted to things. That was my idea of art. So when I left home, I got a federal government scholarship, 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, grade eight, there were so many references that people were talking”

about television and music and films, and they said, "I had no idea." Like AC DC 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 me. I had to catch up so fast, and I would spend half my time, like any time I had spare time, I was in the library reading books doing. What's this thing? What's

across these books on art, a friend that my mum took a job in the town to help keep us a float

“on the farm person as possible. And one of her work colleagues can, had a 35 millimeter camera,”

and a Nikon F1. And he gave it to me. You consider himself an amateur photographer. And he gave it to me and said, "Just put it on if I be an assistant 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 of old trees, dead cars, anything that would link me to what I was saying and used to saying at the farm. 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 just in catch up mode.

Oh, what's, what's this person about? I've never read this book or seen this film. Who's

Tom Cruise? What's he all about? Yeah. Was Tom gun out at that time? Wait, when was this thing? It was a tough feeling. I've got an ace in such a thing. Yeah, and I just stole many people and I'm like, "Wow, is that? Does he live here?" And, you know, I would get loved at so much for my dumb questions. Yeah. Because I'm not, naturally, I'm not quick and I'm not funny, but I can love it myself a lot, you know? Yeah. 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 entire, I could skin a rabbit and I could gas-thish.

“And so that's how I never get in my way for a class school amongst myself. Like, many women”

doing, for, like, into photography, that time. Like, when you get into photography, where, I mean,

another male 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 Antony. Yeah, I wasn't allowed to participate in that. So, I used to have to send my shawng tour a lab in the town.

Well, it's gonna be a process. Yeah. Was this the norm, like, I was this, yeah, I mean, this was not that long ago. Was it? I mean, was it similar in other countries? Was it just,

“you know, 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, it's not, I look at my, when I went and did my MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2010, and jumped along white forward, I was in a class of seven. I was the only girl in my class. It's not wild. Yeah, that is, that is. Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't know what to think about that, really. I mean, it's, I guess, photography, 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 whole stereotype. I don't know. Well, you know, it's why I did worry that more male engineers than female engineers. I don't why they're more female nurses than male nurses. I, yeah, it's a, I don't know if it's a,

a sign of the culture, you know, it's a byproduct of the cultural affairs. It's still kind of, you know, things left over from from the days where that was, like you said, you would not allow it in the dark room, which is just so alien to most people today 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 polar words of beauty, right? In terms of a cow because he wanted to portray the best looking thing that he had in front of him. Was that, did you, you know, and then kind of merged, 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 at 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 went? Oh, so I, you know, for things to me,

things. Foreign things, rusty things. I like things that are brown and yellow. I don't like,

that's there, the conditions of comfort and familiarity and there's things that I understand that

“I grew up around that feels so foundational and so, part of who I am, how I think, how my, if I look”

to, I have a giant bookshelf to my right and it is an old painter's ladder. It is just wood and to, you know, big metal trusses. 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 their brindle carpet and of 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, as women on the farm, we, we dress to the conditions under which we were placed. So if you were out working, you were wearing gumboots and appalling cordialry and home are so in shirts and probably are hard, yeah, can be been braised pair of overalls, which I thought was super sexy. I still love that, that's my favorite outfit.

But when you went to church or when you went shopping or anything like that, you most certainly wore a dress and a skirt and your hair was tied back. 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 wear it matters and the place where it matters the most is how you demonstrate

your love for others. So they never put it as going 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 this thing was a really different thing than like you listening was part of the story. You really held onto the taste of someone's words. That to me to this day is one of the most beautiful traits in another key break. 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 pretty single day. I think”

she's extraordinarily beautiful. I will see, I saw a couple of weeks ago, a guy at an airport, helped a little kid trying to put together some Lego. And it was just lovely this interaction with someone who seems so kind and patient and caring. And this little boy being mesmerized by witnessing 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 always

that I think these things are beautiful. Yeah, we just we almost realize it before, you know, after it's too late kind of thing. But I couldn't agree with you more. If I think to my few friends that I have quite proudly have just less than a handful of really good friends, and they are their biggest trait. I mean, I've put through my wife in there as well. I can't do anything to say this because they're great listeners. And that's, you know, there's something about that.

And it's especially in today's day and age. I sound now I sound old. But especially in today's

“day is where everything is shortfall. I heard someone say, I currently remember I was speaking”

to, you know, a marketing person about this podcast, actually, just a few months ago. And he was he was kept mentioning this phrase long-form conversation. I don't know. It's just conversation. When did it become long-form conversation? And I was just conversation is not a long-form conversation. And that's just a conversation. When did we get away from that? And this whole kind of participatory form of listening is seems to be not lost, but it seems to be much more rare these days. So I

couldn't agree with you more. And it really is a beautiful part of a human being when they can

actually genuinely listening, right? So that's that concept of beauty is almost intrinsic and

we just need to kind of bring it out of people. But how do we do that? You know, talked about your daughter and I don't know you teach and you know, we'll get onto your latest book as an ex-beautiful where the word beautiful is in there and I'm keen to to break that down. But you know, if we're thinking about things like listening and, you know, it just being a good person on the inside, how do we? Well, how did you try and evoke that with images? You know,

“the images is one thing. I think we try to place too much emphasis on the beauty of images and,”

you know, reference people like Robert Adams, you talk about form rather than prettiness and aesthetics.

Where do you sit on, kind of beauty in the visual image side of things and what, what are you looking for, should we say when you're looking at images or when you're creating them for yourself? Because I think this, the way that I look at things or through things, and it's, I must slow, 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

Marylyn Mark used to say. She would say, "I'm going out, I'm looking for pictures." It's instead

“just there and then she finds them and I, she said this in 2010 and I thought, "Wow, I have”

hung to that, hung onto that for a really long time because I don't, I know then 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 look in. It's not just, "I'm seeing the saying, 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 peaks 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 am not interested in the

“meaning of it. I don't go out 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 will grab me and I don't need to know anything else in the moment other than that's it. Let's see how that, let's see how that looks and it says you are full of listening. That's my form of listening with a camera. I can have everything ready, I can be working with another photographer at the moment and with photographing together next to one another in a car. And you realise that what you're

seeing and what you're behaving when you're holding a camera and you're looking out into the world. When someone's right next to you, 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 could be holding an ice cream tub. There's me and my eyes and what I'm noticing and that spark or that piece of instinct, that the intensity

and the desire of it. Because photography for me is all about one, that it is just, it is just range to one last. It is it's so lusty and it's the thing that I want, I take and then I start the process of looking again. Tell me more about that because I want to come back to this other concept of beauty when you look at damaged and simplicity and rust and this kind of this, the objects that are that are broken or most because of the comfort it gives you and this

this connection to feeling safe. So you get these images and you have this, just in the flows, however your process is with the camera and you're listening to yourself as well as to what's

appearing in front of you. You get these images, then you basically rip them apart. So then

about that part of looking and if you can give us a little bit of an idea about that process.

I know it's different every time and with different set of images but we could talk about,

“I think I read or listened to you talk about taking your parents back to the family farm and”

putting the negatives on the souls of your feet as you walked around. What a wonderful idea and that it came out just incredibly. So is you trying to think of something like that every time or tell me about how you go about this part of looking once you've got the images? Yeah, it depends entirely on the project I'm working on 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. I have this love and despair, I think relationship with that place and that time. I didn't want to leave it. So I wanted Tara. I feel like Tara is this low hum that runs through all of my work. There's some kind of Tara of loss. Tara of being slightly misplaced. Tara of things 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 farm, I wanted that Tara. 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 sent in my case more than 20 years making photographing at this place and then to actively destroy it. Like that's it's perverse and then to ask my parents except my only parents now who loved this place and lost it under the most 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 entire year wearing these negatives that I have spent hours making so that you can damage them just enough so that they look just full on enough and just very kind of enough to represent everything that I feel in 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 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, we'd love to help." Well, my mum said that, my dad was like, "Yeah, okay." 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 mum would keep coming back, she likes to revisit, she likes to see, you know, how seems 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 to ahead of yourself,

“don't get to, 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 mean, adjusting curl and beauty said to me in a crate once. She said, "The problem with you is that they're too beautiful." And at the time, I was, "How right? So what do you mean you're too beautiful?" I'm like, "Yeah, maybe they're too beautiful. We're going to maybe they need to be a little bit rougher and I loved it as feedback. I thought, now that's terrific listening and really paying attention to the real estate of an image once

it's been enlarged and framed and presented back to the world." Do you're looking for some way that you can connect these materials because you treat 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 some kind of connection, I guess, is probably the best word for that.

“Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's in part because 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, a way of expression, and I, I hated using

with? Why can't I use something else entirely to be able to put this material on this surface?"

“Because I was constantly thinking about surface. And that carried me through from being a painter”

and a poor painter. I was crack at it. My professor Peter very kindly took me aside and 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. He is a camera. And I hear some familiar with one of these. And so I went out and I made photographs of my entire final year exhibition because I couldn't wrestle with this material this paint in the way that I wanted to. It wouldn't behave. It wouldn't stand still for me.

Like the curves would stand still for dad. And the camera's even worse. Like I cannot wrestle film in the way that I won. It's so tumultuous and naughty and like devilish. And I love that about

photography. I love it. It gives me the burden and says, "Here's what you want, Missy." And here's

“what I'm going to give you. And so we do this a little bit until like I'm moderately satisfied.”

And I can see that. I continue 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 inside us 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 Q&As. We have the podcast of course, but add free with bonus content and we have direct access to me in 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? As fast forward to, we're going to go back and forth a little bit here in timeline wise, but as fast forward to present day and I'm holding your latest book isn't ex but for which I want to definitely want to talk about now, but this is a novella of sorts more like an auto biography, essentially of your time on the farm and as a child growing up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Why right and what does writing do for you that photography

can't? Well, I'll start with the first one because writing was, I was never, I would never

make 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 writing letters, or thank you cards, or handwriting recipes, anything like that. So it was never something to hear. I remember when I moved to bring one school, a very small agricultural school to school in the town of 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, Mr. Sirle gave me a a sheet of paper and a pencil and said, "Well, you sit up the back a while, 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." If the only thing I ever”

remember her saying, "Words will be important to you." I love to write because things that I don't feel warrant, not everything warrant's a photograph. And not everything 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, a thing 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 love long-form conversations, man.

and 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 code. I can sorrow a sentence down towards bare bones, I hope. And so that it doesn't just land somewhere, 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 bandate 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 asked

that question to so many people and I think that's the best answer I've had because I agree with you

and I think it comes across and we're talking about the meaning of X in a minute, but I don't want to give the whole book away. I encourage everyone to go by this book, of course. So I thought I'd just read from your website in terms of the kind of synopsis of this book and we would talk about what you just you mentioned then in terms of writing and what X means. So this is what the synopsis is. Isn't X beautiful? It's an auto biographical reckoning with family

memory, the fate of that plot of land and the history of photography are interwoven at every turn with a letter X. A shadowy character, a placeholder for nothing and everything.

An age-old standing for the indefinable, teaming with free associative factoid,

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 tells and explains a little bit about the blind spots of your personal narrative. I think 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 such a cool character. It's just, it's like, it's such 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 are about that. 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've 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 Lossie 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 was, if you either make this, this is like, that is a sign of age, right? When you make, this is the symbol for a file. You got to do that as well. Oh, and this. Oh, and there. Yeah, if anyone had a zero, then I'm not for goodness sake. It'd go all the way around now. Oh,

“wait, run, then you have to. Oh, no, it might be that beautiful sound. Say, as I'm recounting these”

things and calling my mom and and we have these, they're not quite arguments, but she will remember one thing one way. I will remember to do it for a while. My dad will step in and go, no, you've got it all wrong. And we'll give this recap. Those are the kinds of things that maybe not blind spots, but the things that appearing have disappeared have shaped shifted along the way. They're the shapeshifters. 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, you know, there's I know it's like when you carry a camera, and you cannot see left or right or what's behind you. You can only see in the frame, and even then every time you get your negative spark or you're

And we're looking at the smallest piece of the world from the warehouse of forms that we could

be paying attention to. So it's all the things that probably just were swept away in the review. As, as the track 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 the 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 troll 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 anti-marrying the corner. It's anti-sealware. And someone has repounded 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 this wrong. Storytelling proves this wrong. And there's something delicious about going, you know what? I think I'll remember the fiction. 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 that exact. I don't think that's possible. And good, because the version that we're probably giving away is probably just that bit shinier, that bit brighter, maybe that bit sadder, then it really was. Yeah, memory is an action. In the couple of lines in this book that

“I think you've just, you kind of threw in there as an exclamation mark. Well, first of all, actually,”

I would talk about exclamation marks. Why, what's the intent of using the exclamation mark after the, you know, at 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 anti-sealware 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 share a, I figured what

it was now Marianne and but my cousin was Sharon and and my dad had grave reservations about that. So I was, I just had a little, uh, with a letter X on a above the crib in the hospital and

“anti-sealware came in when the first photograph was night of me and said, oh, isn't it?”

It's beautiful in the way she says it to me with that like me. I know the time was an exclamation point and kind of funny like I can picture her saying in the way she's like, oh, isn't it beautiful as if to say give her a name the love. Yeah, just sarcasm through the whole sentence

always. Yeah, because you talk about the, you know, the fact that X is, you know, goes back to that

moment 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 shape essentially, this one arbitrary, just feature in this thing that we call alphabet, but it seems to have appeared so much in your life and I feel like reading this, you didn't necessarily insert meaning where it wasn't, you know, a parent or hadn't presented itself to you. So I think there's kind of this really weird and serendipitous kind of relationship

you have with this letter. It's kind of romantic it away, but you know, we think about photography,

a couple of sentences like that kind of book and the book, I think that makes any sense. The first

one is it's really early on and 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 prism, which was very, very interesting. We think about those two sentences

that you wrote kind of at each end of the book. I'd love for you to explain, try and explain each one and the kind of connective tissue in between without us going through the whole book.

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 witness there and there's not true 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, and that's why I used the analogy”

in the book. You can open the refrigerator and go, I can't find the cheese for the cheeses, friends dinner, you know, it's like it's right there, isn't 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 saying we're just not paying attention to what is, what is there and what what we're connecting to in that act of looking. And so, 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 relook at because photography is also a process of a relook.

There's you of 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 see pictures, we see the world and then we see photographs in the world. And if you ask any photographer, I bet they will have a catalogue 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 juicy or an all-asher 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 looking like, 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 a concept of listening. You know, it's the look, the noticing is just the visual version of listening, right? And actually paying attention to what you're observing. So I think that's really profound. And I think that's the start

or an essential ingredient of having a voice, and I hate to throw the kind of a cliché term,

like voice in there. But, you know, if I was to look at you as an artist and what you've created over the years as well as what you're still doing, I think, wow, a debt really has a strong voice, whether that's like a personal voice or more of an activist voice for some of some other types of photographers and artists. Where did you ever think like that was it? You know, I've got some need 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 want to try something here in curiosity here and see what comes of it. The reason I'm asking that is, hey, 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 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, 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 set it before? Yeah, better. Is 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 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. Richie or work will be regardless of what it is, regardless of what you're

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 cannot 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 you 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, we think of, if you think about the catalog of music, film, 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, fallen, 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. Oh, but oh, and when you are willing to be really, really honest about what motivates you

“and what you care about, that's what will make whatever you are working on for 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 and now, 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 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 devour, but also to stay resonant to what feels most that completes the complete part of you that can only come out in the out of making something. Yeah, there's almost two facets 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 bravenous, right? It's one thing being honest with”

yourself inside, but it's another thing going, well, I'm brave enough to put this out into the world now. Sometimes, it doesn't quite resonate, but you look at the best artists in the world and that is a common threat. They have the vulnerability and they have the bravenous to put

that vulnerability out there. So where did that? Was there a seminal moment? I mean, there never

is a seminal moment, but in a kind of timeline or a rough age that you were, they're kind of clicked for you or you understood what your mission was in that sense. The whole purpose was with a camera and with writing that sense. Did you just kind of wake up 20 years later? Oh, yeah, I've got my message out of there, Sam. No, I'm the biggest contractor myself ever. I get out of bed and go, right, time to play, time to have fun, also time to work. 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 revolve around the sum 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 going to make a ton of failure and I have made buckets of it. Draws of it are kind of boxes of crap that have come to nothing. I have a studio that is full of a fail projects and every now and then I will go into, I now call them my

box of potentials because I feel like they're 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 rust them around because I keep it all. 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 want something to come out well considered, well articulated, that the context, the structure, everything is good. Everything is finer. It's like the Instagram postamentality. I have to craft this just right, get the pictures right, get all my language right and then it dumps it out. They're good. I'm making this not that process for me and I don't think it should be that process necessarily that we aspire to either. Being an artist is hard, making stuff is hard.

It's really difficult to go, no, I can do this thing. I'm going to make this thing and even if it sucks, I'm going to make it anyway because it will teach me something. You just need to have to keep making. You keep making and you expect nothing. I expect nothing and I make everything.

“How often do you, this is a rhetorical question, because I think we both know the answer,”

but how often do you make something and it fail but not fail in the sense that you've learned

something or taking something away from it? You never make something and consider it a complete,

well, you know, failure. That's going in the bin. That was a complete waste of my time. Never never happens. 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 all do it, 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, it is. Okay, can I be bothered to do this? Can we want to do that? Yeah. We're so lazy and we like a quick fix and we like things to be immediate and like the best tangible example that I can give you right now. I bought myself quite intentionally, one of these disc 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 as a sentence, a half sentence and I would fill it up in pencil and I am still doing it. 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,

“yes. It's exercise because writing to write well to write, you need to be doing that”

ship every day, every single day. So I write something every day. And then it turned into, I started rereading things that went, whoa, this sentence is great, everything else around it, dreadful and then it's turned into something else. So if you don't even have to come at something by thinking I'm making art or I'm making the ball cry, I'm making the project as soon as we call it project, as soon as we call it ball cry, 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 Zady Six 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 with people of thinking like that as photographers with our own images, like, yeah, I like these images in the

you've tried it like insert meaning and story and narrative 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 going to say about it and I don't even know if it works and the key is not there, blah, blah, blah, blah, which we all go through, of course. And sometimes it's just going to take your foot off the gas pedal and just go, whoa, 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, we think kind of thing. 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? Are they too, to private? No, I, so I started, like most of my things, they transitioned

from the like Alender to a notebook. I'm always putting things in a book and in this case, I'm

sticking photographs. I cool. Next to the daily writing, so I've, I've tucked it out. So this is what you posted on socials the other week. Yeah, I, I, it is. 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've, I've 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 Santag'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. Please. Um, so here's,

you never will akin to the same photograph twice, even conflict sits inside tenderness.

when you do. Ouch. Some pain in that. Yeah. Always pay it in terror, man. I can't write anything

good or photograph anything good. If there isn't pain loss, terror, some form of damage attached to it. I've, 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, let's see on the favorite thing. I, you know, love her of home full of woe. Do you know why that, you know, the, 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 all, 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, or, you know,

“connected with in terms of that emotion and the, the complexities of pain and, and hope and damage?”

I think if there's loss, 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 that's had to go right and that there's that the awareness is, I think my, whether it's upgrading 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 a beautiful and sound to being something

where the, almost the opposite or there's this 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 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, I was doing, we have a private community and we, we, we talk about this concept of everyone talks about this word art and beauty and storytelling and all these kind of buzzwords that get thrown around and we really understand 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 have 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 and can understand it and that is the act of, you know, beauty and art. That is, that is, that is, so, it's not terrible at all. It sounds though like you use that almost as a coping mechanism or you sort of use your art and that what you make out of it as a

coping mechanism for the, the, the, the damage that you are trying to unpack, which in itself is, is beautiful and the, what a privilege that we have, the skills or the, the artistic integrity tip have something like photography and writing to make sense of that and to cope with it.

“And I think that's why you, you do it in such a great way because it, let's just, who you are.”

But you, the, what you read out to me was so beautiful and I'm going to get the, I'm going to kind of cut that bit out the transcripts of this conversation, but you, you said conflict, was it conflict inside tenderness? What, what, I'm pretty stupid when it comes to these types of things, but 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 her.

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 on the pain and how we live. It was, it's, it's a, it's a very book and beautiful. But to feel,

Does it mean that has to have been conflict as part of that? Is that conflict is resolved through tenderness? The tenderness can only exist to be cause 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 we do want to kind of understand it more.”

But moving forward without putting on spot all the time, tell me, you mentioned your,

see, work on three things at the moment. First of all, that's beautiful. I love the, the,

I guess, not the contrast, but the, the complimenting of an image with your daily sentence, or I thought, you know, I love, I love the idea. And yeah, I'm interested to see how that comes out when it comes out. But the second thing you said your work on is this, actually, what did he say of something to do with Susan Sontag's on photography? You, you break it down. You're, you're diving into it. How, what is, tell me more about it?

“I have, 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 Snapchat. She talks about vernacular photography a lot. There's not a single image in that book. Not one. Fair juice. She was the writer, and she wrote a lot about photography among other subjects. The book tends 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, um, to illustrate alongside

Sontag's words. But the bulk of her writing in that book is about every day photography,

and so I wanted to do a retelling of it, where rather than it been about words, it's just all of

every day photography. Okay. That sort of, through the pictures almost tells the story of Sontag's essays that appear in that book. So I worked with the Peter J. Cohen collection in New York and spent the day with Peter and with Carly. Here's a system going through thousands of photographs, every day pictures that don't have a home, or have a home in this collection, to try and match them to each page of Susan Sontag's books. I had to read and re-read

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 going to be a retelling, but through by the means by which she wrote about every day, every day 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 in essays, or is there some kind of disagreement there, or kind of

“rebellion against what the way she talked about photography and her ideas around it?”

Yeah, and that's for Bellian 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, seems so different, middle-end, 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 kinds of things that Sontag 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 rejecting 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,

what she was writing, but just wow, extraordinary it is for 50 years ago, for point after point,

to still be on point about photography. And it was, that's when I thought, okay, if I'm going to retell this, 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 every day pictures like every day people to some not necessarily illustrate, but to 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 do vehemently disagree with? I mean, something that comes to me, I mean, she talked about to photograph someone as to violate them, right, which she had, she had some darkness 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 her son, that her son published,

you know, I'm good many years later, I would read them and think, wow, no, that's not the case, or I disagree, or unless so and on photography, at least, yeah. But they're great essays to

“work through to think about how they acquired to your practice. And go, oh, do I think like that?”

Do I see like that? Is that still relevant to me? Is it still relevant to the way photograph? Yeah, and every time I, I mean, it's like any book I think, any time you dive into it, depending on what you're working on, what you've read or consumes in the main time changes,

you perspective of 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 set, 10, 20, 30 minutes, just watching the noise inside my head, do what noise does. It has it 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 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. It's 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 sub-stack page called "There's no self-development without self-awareness." Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for listening. Do you recommend,

I mean, tell me more about your teaching, I guess, because you have an influence in your position,

“you know, teaching students, photography, and how do you recommend, or what do you recommend?”

Should I say, do you recommend people like to use this on TV? 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, so I started teaching in 2013, 2014. I had a tenured track job at the University of South

after I done my NFA, and I loved it. But the very first teaching experience I had was as an

“undergraduate student at RISD, I proposed, and they met me teach with a very first time a student”

to propose a course in the photo department called interrogating snapshot, and we looked at the history of snapshot photography. And I just, I loved it. I got so much out of it, because I don't think you can teach without learning alongside your students, and I don't think you, I don't think there's a teaching claim to note 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 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 meat 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 ice-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 wait time. Maybe it has to go into high donation for a bit. You or the work? What kind of questions would you be asking then? Obviously you can't give specifics, because it depends on every individual, but it's going to be a ballpark in terms of what we could be asking ourselves. You know, a photo critique is a perfect kind of Petri dish of what happens there. You

know, you have 20 minutes with Odaengland and what kind of questions are you asking to help the photographer or the student ideate, or as well as articulate what the how this came about.

“And so understand what their next step might be. Yeah, I think in a critique situation,”

when I'm with a group of students, it's very different. 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 for 20 minutes. This isn't enough. I'm 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. I want to know, I'm usually asking about not necessarily what it's made of, but how did this situation come to be? 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 asked depending on the work,

you know, a point out to me, where's the critical thing inside this work that you could not

“live without. This work can't exist without this thing. What is the thing inside this work?”

Is it it's entirety? Is it this subject? Is it the quality of shape that shadow might 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. I'm thinking specifically here at the time of graffiti. If I was asking about sculpture or needlework or jewelry or metal smithing, I might ask it. I'm curious what people are motivated by, to even make the photograph. Why a photograph

of this? Did you move over here, or did you move over here, or how long were you in this vicinity of this picture coming into being? Who was reviewed? So that I can understand how it's how born. I can't understand now something was born and how arrives into the world if I don't know the conditions that sit around it. And it's often times when a student will say, can I record this conversation? I'll say yes, because you will say things in the description of

forget, or you won't even be paying attention to what you're saying, because you're so busy thinking

“if you're answering the question wanting to sound smart, and you know what you're doing. My favorite”

thing is someone has no clue. Like brilliant. Let's enter the fog together. Like it's in a beautiful fog. We don't have to have the exact answer. No. Wonderful. Wonderful. I'm asking myself for those questions now. So we're running out of time, so we'll wrap up, but I'm interested to end on the future, I guess, of photography and you teaching students. I'm interested in to hearing what

you observe is coming through if anything different and 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, you pack it everything into short form content, or a”

single image. And all of the challenges that we have of it 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 that 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, they're worries for the most part, what they're motivated by, what they concern with a different. The one thing that you nights them all is their lack of trust and faith in what they express and how they express it, through pitch-a-making or through their writing. It's like there's this disconnect between them feeling, they know they want to make and they know they have something to say.

And it goes back to our earlier conversation point on this, is that there's apprehension and there's doubt. My own practice often starts with a sense of doubt, you know, this is 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 this 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 15 minutes and talking to them, it doesn't even have to be a formal student, but you know, I'm doing some work at the local darkroom here and people want to have a sense of confidence in their skills. 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 wherever our interpretation of

food is, we can do. Yeah. And that's the theme 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. But there's not enough care and attention to the act of helping others feel like they will create safely, studiously, intermittently. Well, having had that kind of a microcosm of your support and your empathy with other people

trying to make some kind of art from themselves. I can certainly agree with you talking like that

I mean, without going to school, do you offer any private mentorship, is there where can people find you

“and connect with you? Is that something that 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 things like the Chico Review where you and I met or I teach for the

LA Center for Photography as well. There's lots of short form courses that I've been involved with

over the years, but people can just reach out to me, too with questions. I still get questions from so many Chico participants this year saying, hey, what's your 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 just

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, take a look at this, that's how you grow it. It's”

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 shouldn't be going to be on this planet if we're not doing that. Well, unfortunately, a lot of those types of things are very well gait-capped with so many. So Kudos to you for breaking numbers, Barras, and thank you for being the figure in this industry that we desperately need and that we can really learn a lot from and take massive inspirations from myself included.

So Ode, thank you so much for being who you are and also just being on this chat with me. It's been an absolute honor and privilege and hopefully we can meet again in person another day when I can show you my own work and hopefully you're there. You'll be impressed with it, but we'll see. I would love that. It's my next favorite thing makes to teaching or being involved with others. It's 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 a, it's just a luxury, isn't it?”

But 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 until then, thank you so much at it and I wish you all the best and I hope you get some rest after your travels and I look forward to chatting with you again soon. Thank you, Rebecca, to you.