AIPAD 2015: ODETTE ENGLAND

Develop Before 07/1991 (Kodacolor Gold 200 12),  2014-2015

Series Title: Develop Before

Number of Artworks at AIPAD: 5

Edition: 3 + 1AP

Size: 20"x20" image on 24x24" sheet

Medium: Archival Pigment Print

Year: 2014–2015

Home is the center-weight of Odette England's artistic practice, with memory and forgetting being the counterbalances. Her photographs are fragile, contemplative and temporal spaces. She works with expired film, vintage cameras, damaged negatives and alternative photo processes; exploring the volatility of identity, emphasizing the unstable nature of the past/present and the parent/child seesaw.

The Develop Before series continues these overall themes. Completed 2014–2015, this series of twelve photographs is newly released to the market, with their exhibition at AIPAD 2015, being their first-time showing. 

"Grandpa was a collector – matchboxes, bird’s eggs, seeds, postcards – but one of his most curious collections comprised old Kodak 126 film boxes, each neatly unfolded, held together in a stack with a thin rubber band and placed inside a worn, faded green plastic bag hidden in the back of a freezer.  On the outside of each box, where Kodak had printed 'Develop Before' together with the film’s expiry date (a practice that dates from the end of the 19th century) Grandpa had circled the date in red pen, as if to ensure that the snapshots he took would be revealed at their very best and 'freshest'.

What struck me wasn’t that the boxes themselves had expired, but that they were simultaneously the same and different, much like family snapshots.  There is homogeneity to how we make snapshots the world over, both in terms of subject matter and our behaviour (as subjects ourselves) in front of the lens.  Grandpa's boxes have their own unique marks of age – wrinkles, scars, stains, bruises – things we tend to avoid in family photography.  They were also never intended to be subjects of photography: boxes are simply trash – nothing of value, though to Grandpa, worth something.  I was compelled to photograph them, using a heavily modified Kodak Instamatic, expired photography chemicals and a scanner."—Odette England

Collections holding the work of Odette England include the New Mexico Museum of Art (Santa Fe), George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film (Syracuse) and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago).