10/12/2025
‘To Be Developed, To Be Continued’ by Odette England.
Published by Tall Poppy Press.
From ’s 2025 Best Photobooks of the Year:
“Odette England has been making personal, evocative and smart photobooks for sometime now - and this newest publication released through Australian-based Tall Poppy Press feels like the third part of a trilogy that started with Dairy Character in 2021, and The Long Shadow in 2024.
This book is the most open and vulnerable of the three - it is large, soft, monochrome, and feels slow and gentle. The images inside also have this sense, meditative yet deliberate - they seem to gentle ebb and flow as the pages turn. Continuing a collaborative approach to making work, with her daughter Hepburn, England shows us limbs, obscured landscapes, dreamy meadows, and makeshift sheets as backdrops for ephemeral still life photographs. She places objects and bodies too close or too far away to be precisely discerned, and the result draws you into a tender and personal space. It’s easy to imagine all these images are stills taken from a BW Super 8 film such is their flow, and their undeniable transitory and delicate quality.
The book itself approximates the scale of a scrapbook, and some of its pages evoke that sensibility further, showing ripped images, and pieces of tape holding ideas/moments together. The shifts in scale and placement of images show us a photographer/editor thinking deeply about the poetics of the book as an intimate space. The paper stock is itself warm and earthy - occasionally a soft, pale pink tinge infuses a page, reminding us of the bodies at the centre of the visual narrative.
Even the occasional muted, pastel colour images do little to snap us out of the dreamlike space this book creates. Each page layout, and the way each sequence moves and oscillates seems to hint at the transitory nature of childhood, motherhood, nature, and relationships. This book embraces the short-lived space of each moment in all its fragmentary, confusing, tactile, bodily nowness - a rare achievement.”
- Daniel Boetker-Smith, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Australia
