Book Review: Odette England’s “Dairy Character” — PhotoSpark
Dairy Character by Odette England
Saint Lucy Books, Sept. 2021
Hardcover / 9 x 6.75 inches /188 Pages
The color pink’s association with femininity often pervades modern understandings of gender, despite its earlier affiliation with boy children. Red was seen as a warlike color, and its’ dilution with the ‘purity’ of white seen to be suitable for masculine children. Pinks, particularly soft, bodily pinks, create one of several interlocking frameworks that Dairy Character uses to investigate the parameters of a gendered childhood on a dairy farm. Part memoir, part archive, Dairy Character pulls no punches. As with her pictures, England’s writing comes from the gut, an unfiltered mix of desire and disgust, research and memory.
England’s storytelling is nonlinear, and the photographs are arranged in kind. Dot gain images from a manual belonging to England’s father force the viewer to step back from the book to recalibrate one’s vision — the assembly of monochromatic dots only then becomes legible as close-cropped photographs of cows. In neighboring pages, soft, blurred photographs by Odette’s mother require careful examination through their pink haze, an attribute which is accentuated by a series of sharp, seemingly recent black and white photographs of a young girl. Of the archival imagery, particularly striking is a series of images indicating the correct alignment of a cow’s hoof, calling to mind instructional guides to good posture, so often aimed at women. Sequence and pacing become a vital tool for visual comparison as the parallels between women and livestock become increasingly transparent.
Similar to England’s previous publication, Keeper of the Hearth, all of the essential writing is strategically placed at the center of the book, rather than having it act as preamble or postscript. This positions the writing as an integral component to the work itself, rather than simply an explanation for it. Specific stories in the text evoke pictures one has already seen at this point in the book, and the images that follow recall memories so viscerally described in England’s writing. The importance of gendered symbolism pervades these memories, with blue paper used for ancestral record-keeping and archives, while flowers are at best, useless, and at worst, harmful.
From beginning to end, England’s sequence of photographs point toward the contradictory expectations placed on women, especially in agricultural communities. While expected to conform to traditional gendered roles, they must also act in opposition to them in service of the success of agricultural pursuits; all of these roles they inhabit must be performed invisibly.
Dairy Character is available now from Saint Lucy Books.
Originally published at https://www.photo-spark.com on January 25, 2022.
