Odette Elix England: Isn't X Beautiful!

Odette Elix England: Isn't X Beautiful!

Odette England • The Ice Plant

ISBN-13: 979‑8985733068 · 2026

Live offer for this book: 6 live copies of this book from $29.49 (as of 2026-09-08).

Dimensions: 108mm; 152mm

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Completeness 55

Cover quality: good

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From Xanax to Xanadu to Kodak Double X, Odette England's photographic memoir-cum-meditation is a reckoning with childhood, memory and the meaning of imagesWriter and artist Odette Elix England (born 1975) first crossed paths with photographyand, crucially, the letter Xas 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.

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6 live copies of this book from $29.49 (as of 2026-09-08).

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