Isn't X Beautiful!.

Photographs and text by Odette Elix England.

The Ice Plant, Los Angeles, 2026. 200 pp., 10 photographs, 4¼x6½".

Writer and artist Odette Elix England (born 1975) first crossed paths with photography—and, crucially, the letter X—as a child on her family’s 200-acre dairy farm in Southern Australia, watching her sharecropping father make SX-70 Polaroids of cattle in the springtime. In Isn’t X Beautiful!, an autobiographical reckoning with family memory, the fate of that plot of land and the history of photography are tangled and bound at every turn with the ubiquitous letter X: shadowy character, placeholder for nothing and everything, age-old stand-in for the indefinable. Teeming with free-associative factoids, humor and philosophical tangents, and written with the obsessive idiosyncrasy of Tim Carpenter’s To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die, England’s ambling 10-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.

Odette Elix England was raised in rural South Australia and now teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, her work blends autobiography with photographs to explore place, gender, and rituals of loving and leaving.

Cat# ZK885S Softbound $25.00 (9798985733068)
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