Odette England

The Long Shadow is a collaborative homage-style investigation into the eleven-year gap from 1942-1953 when the American photographer Marion Post Wolcott lived in Loudoun County, Virginia. This gap immediately follows her position as a photographer for the United States Farm Security Administration, which Wolcott left at the behest of her husband Lee and boss Roy Stryker. Wolcott’s contribution to the history of photography during this gap – a record that should include, and value, motherhood and other forms of unpaid reproductive labor as creative acts – has been overlooked.

I have revisited the ‘Virginia years’ for three years, making photographs in and around the Wolcott’s former farms. I learned that Marion had the idea of doing a children’s book of farm photographs, which never materialised because Lee objected to the time it would take away from her child-raising responsibilities.

Odette England makes photographs, collages, and photo books about gender-social relations, reproductive labor, estrangements, and rituals. She also collect snapshots and other images from public and private archives to use in her work. Her goal is to investigate cultural history and present-day policy areas that deserve more attention. Into these, she often weaves autobiography, having been raised in an isolated immigrant male-dominant rural community. She uses her experience as a mother and dairy farmer’s daughter to intervene in larger discussions about how we center ourselves within communities we know and those we find and adopt along the way.

The Long Shadow celebrates the creative life of a woman whose professional photography career ended abruptly in 1942, who became overwhelmed with the chaotic household and her dual responsibilities as a farmer and a farmer’s wife, and who sought solace in making slow, quiet photographs with an undertow of unease in the shadows.