Isn't X Beautiful

Odette Elix England 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 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 interwoven at every turn with the letter X: a shadowy character, a placeholder for nothing and everything, an age-old stand-in for the indefinable. Teeming with free-associative factoids, humor, and philosophical tangents, Elix England’s 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.