©Odette England, from the series Your Distance Makes Me Close To You, 2021

Over the coming days, we are thrilled to present the recipients of the Film Photo Award from the Fall 2021 submission period.

The Film Photo Award is open to all emerging, established, and student photographers worldwide. Each award period provides three distinct grants of Kodak Professional Film and complimentary film processing by Griffin Editions to photographers who demonstrate a serious commitment to the field and are motivated to continue the development of still, film-based photography in the 21st century.

Two Visionary Project Awards (100 rolls or 200 sheets of Kodak Professional Film + film processing via Griffin Editions) and one Student Project Award (100 rolls or 200 sheets of Kodak Professional Film + film processing via Griffin Editions + a 4×5 view camera by Standard Cameras) are awarded twice a year, spring and fall.

Stay tuned for the Spring 2022 call for proposals that will open in early 2022. For the latest information, follow Film Photo Award on Instagram: @filmphotoaward

©Odette England, from the series Your Distance Makes Me Close To You, 2021

Fall 2021 Visionary Project Award recipient
Odette England

Through photography, image archives, and text, Odette England explores home, autobiography, female labor, and ritual. Her work has been exhibited in more than 100 museums, galleries, and art spaces worldwide. Recent photobooks include Keeper of the Hearth: Picturing Roland Barthes’ Unseen Photograph; Dairy Character, winner of the 2021 Light Work Book Award; and Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg, her collaboration with Jennifer Garza-Cuen. England’s latest project Your Distance Makes Me Close to You, for which she will use the awarded film, involves traveling across America to make photographs of the sinewy relationship between homesickness and beauty. Documenting the process of finding “home” in being away. Probing the mysteries and pleasures of what is—and what becomes—dear and important to us.

©Odette England, from the series Your Distance Makes Me Close To You, 2021

The photographs presented here represent past work examples from England’s Your Distance Makes Me Close to You project she will be continuing with the help of this grant. We’ll be keeping in touch with England and the other recipients over the coming year, and look forward to an interview and feature of some of the works made with this grant toward the end of 2022.

©Odette England, from the series Your Distance Makes Me Close To You, 2021

Odette England has exhibited her work in more than 100 museums, galleries, and art spaces worldwide including the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, George Eastman Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art, and Philadelphia Photo Arts Center.
Honors include a $42,500 grant as Artist-In-Residence Fellow at Amherst College, Light Work $5,000 Artist-in-Residence Fellowship, 3×8 Nature Artist-in-Residence Fellowship in Lecce, Italy, Silver Eye Center for Photography Fellowship ($500), and Firecracker Photographic Grant. England was also nominated for the Prix Pictet, the global award for photography and sustainability. Other grant awards include Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2018 and 2019), Anonymous Was a Woman (2020), and the CENTER Project Launch Award ($5,000 in 2012). She was shortlisted for the 2021 Film Photo Award, Penumbra Workspace Program, and Sustainable Arts Foundation Award.

Among many artist residencies, England collaborated with Guggenheim Fellow Jennifer Garza-Cuen at the invitation-only Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. Radius Books published their joint photography project, Past Paper Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg, awarded a $5,000 Rauschenberg Publication Grant, in 2021. For this project, the artists made 200 unique camera-less photographs by submerging expired photo-paper once owned by Rauschenberg in his swimming pool, exposing it to sunlight and moonlight.
England’s critically-acclaimed edited volume, Keeper of the Hearth (Schilt Publishing, 2020) was named a Photobook of the Year by American Suburb X, LensCulture, Lenscratch, The Luupe, and What Will You Remember. This book was part of her three-year Winter Garden Photograph Project which she invited more than 200 photographers from around the world to reimagine the family snapshot Roland Barthes describes in Camera Lucida (1980). The Houston Center for Photography hosted a major five-month exhibition for the entire project.

Saint Lucy Books published England’s third photobook, Dairy Character, which received the 2021 Light Work Book Award ($5,000). This book loosely chronicles her experience growing up in a male-dominant farming community.

England’s photographs have appeared in American Photo, Australian Art Monthly, British Journal of Photography, Der Standaard, GUP, Hotshoe International Musee, JRNL, Photo District News, Photograph, SPOT, The Brooklyn Rail, The Guardian, and The Photo Review, among many other print publications.

England has taught photography at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design, and guest-lectures at the Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, Colorado) and the Los Angeles Center for Photography. Invited artist talks and critiques include Boston University, Brown University, Harvard University, Kenyon College, Lesley College of Art & Design, Princeton University, the School of Visual Arts, Stanford University, and Syracuse University.

She holds an MA in Communication Culture and Language from the University of South Australia, an MFA in Photography with Honors from the Rhode Island School of Design, and she received a scholarship to complete her P.hD at the Australian National University.

England writes essays and reviews for numerous journals, magazines, and blogs including photo-eye, Strange Fire Collective, and Lenscratch.

She is a permanent US resident and lives and works from studios in New York City and Providence, Rhode Island.

©Odette England, from the series Your Distance Makes Me Close To You, 2021

©Odette England, from the series Your Distance Makes Me Close To You, 2021

©Odette England, from the series Your Distance Makes Me Close To You, 2021

©Odette England, from the series Your Distance Makes Me Close To You, 2021

©Odette England, from the series Your Distance Makes Me Close To You, 2021

©Odette England, from the series Your Distance Makes Me Close To You, 2021

©Odette England, from the series Your Distance Makes Me Close To You, 2021

©Odette England, from the series Your Distance Makes Me Close To You, 2021

©Odette England, from the series Your Distance Makes Me Close To You, 2021

©Odette England, from the series Your Distance Makes Me Close To You, 2021