Bone & Thunder
Final Thoughts on Reading Odette England’s “Dairy Character”: Part Three, Conclusion
Dad installed a bare bulb under the corrugated iron roof about which hundreds of fat coppery moths congregated every night. Flapping, buzzing, vibrating, squeaking, their bodies warped by desire. Odette England
She opens the book with three short paragraphs of what it was to be a young girl alone, in bed at night, afraid of the dark. She is looking out the window at that bare bulb of the porch light left on to reassure her and she becomes entranced by the wonder of the moths, their vibrating “bodies warped by desire”. As an artist that trance continues.
Through photographs and writing her beautiful book walks us through those growing up years surrounded by cows and calves and family and dairy farming. We see how that place and its culture shaped her push to understand her own body, desires and identity. We are brought as readers to stand there with her - as bare and vulnerable as she was - in the lovely and sometimes lacerating confusion of becoming fully human. A becoming that happens in the midst of the entrenched mores and loving warmth of a western rural farm culture.
Like any strong river “Dairy Character” has multiple currents, eddies, inlets and outlets to explore and in this concluding essay I want to lightly touch on just three. First, what does this book tell us about her relationship to photography and its importance in her life and perhaps in that of most children that came of age in the latter part of the twentieth century. Second, as creaturely beings ourselves how might a life on a farm surrounded by hundreds of cows create in a young person a dialog or a see-saw examination of the “me” - and the “not me”. Lastly, looking back on her years of youthful exploration how did she find her independent fully formed way in a walled off patriarchal farming society.
Someone recently asked me if a photobook and a book about photography was the same thing. That’s a big question with no easy answer. Of course one approach is to say either - “yes and no” - or if like me and the Duderino you’re not into the whole brevity thing: “it kind of depends on why you’re asking.” An operation manual explaining best practices and the ins and outs of a Rolleiflex camera will have some photos and be in a sense about photography, as will a collection of essays, say, Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”. But, those are not really photobooks.
On the other hand Robert Frank’s “The Americans” is only a book about photography inasmuch as it shows us what the medium is capable of in the right hands. It really does not call into direct examination the question of what is this thing called photography. It uses photography as a way of examining the human condition. Most would agree it is quintessentially a photobook.
In “Dairy Character” we have our cake and eat it too. Here photography is one of the subjects under direct examination. It is almost as much a book about photography as it is a photobook. It should be assigned reading at photography schools everywhere. Ms. England’s parlor trick is to use photography to examine photography and life in relationship. My favorite photograph in the book is one she gives us only in words and it is pivotal. It is a Polaroid photo of the artist as a small child. We know its a Polaroid because only her Dad uses the Polaroid which he keeps locked away in his filing cabinet. It the photo she sits astride a prize watermelon. The Polaroid is:
His camera, used only for taking photographs of His Girls. This watermelon is special, his produce. I too am his produce, his firstborn, squatting on his first worthy watermelon. The fruit is the star. I am there for scale.
‘His Girls’, a recurrent theme, refers to his dairy cow herd, mostly. Later England places this photo on top of a photo her Mom took more recently at the artist’s request of tumble weeds on their old now abandoned farm. And in this collage the artist finds her true self. Speaking of her Mom’s disposable camera flash of a tumble weed she says:
Blur and grain marry. The image looks and feels prickly. When I place Dad’s photograph of his worthy watermelon on top of mum’s, I have roly-poly horns. I am now the she-devil I was called more than once., probably in jest.
In this collage of flat time and space. I look at Dad.” * * *
To be clear there is deep love and powerful bonds with her father evident throughout. And the dividing lines and a straining against are obvious too. It is her Mom with her Instamatic that documents the children and the family life. In their use of their cameras and the purposes of their photographs we’re given to see fundamental strata of an entire world of being for the artist as a young girl and now as a grown artist in full possession of a language that she is in love with and has mastered.
In dozens of ways this book brings into focus how photographs and our interactions with them reveal so much more than the mere shadow play of objects depicted.
In the funny and alarming interleaving of dot-grain vernacular cow photographs (credited properly in the colophon to “Holstein Friesian Association of Australia) with gorgeous bare skinned girl and boy body portraits we flow into the examination of where does girl-child creature stop and cow begin. While there is a lightness and playful charm to these creaturely questions brought out in this back and forth, we get that the artist is playing for keeps in trying to sort all of this out.
Conformity and non-conformity is a major fault line in her young world. A good cow has good conformation - this is second nature to her from the age of 6. And she errs delightedly on the side of non-conformity early and often. As she revels in it we come to revel in it as well. And we begin to see it in the photographs that she selects and in the delightful spreads that are created with the play. Ultimately we find her “path found” moment when at last one of the vets to visit the farm is to her amazement and perhaps to her father’s confusion or chagrin - a WOMAN - and there it happens.
Using the terms of cow culture and contrasting how the ‘lady vet’ rolled with the usually gentlemen vet visits she says:
She had a small white truck. Said hello to me. No handshake. She didn’t join us for breakfast. Dad doesn’t remember her name. What did she look like? She had a hide on her.
Strong loin. Broad forehead. Large open nostrils, strong lower jaw. Hips wide and prominent. She did not have impressive style or an attractive carriage with a graceful walk.
I wanted to be her.
Soon after this we are brought to understand that her family’s farm is ‘in the red’ - a refrain - ‘too far in the red’ and that the cycle of this way of life is ending for her. We see finally that her coming of age as the farm is fading yields a powerful thinker and creator in the world who can bring forward what makes her who she is in a way that let’s us have a little taste of it and maybe have the courage to ask ourselves. What was it - good and bad - that shaped us? What can we make of that?
Finally, describing her working life with cows (and what every well lived life will know) she says:
Days I had to shave rumps; the only time I was taught to shave anything, anywhere. Days of impact. Days of scars. The kind you see forever, feel forever. Fate written in the skin, layers down, face down emotion side down. Days of gore and blood, of bone and thunder.
Our days were numbered.
No photographs of that.
Incredibly that is what a mere photobook well conceived, well made and well read can deliver - days of bone and thunder. Thank you Ms. England for this book.
#ReadingPhotoBooksInBed
Post Scriptum: Much like a film, a photobook is most often the result of collaboration; in this case the team at Saint-Lucy Books. Bravo!