Photographs by Francesca Odell go on public view for the first time in 30 years on 4 October 2026, when Francesca Odell: Coping With and Enjoying Life opens at The Turner House in Penarth as part of the Ffoto Cymru festival.

The exhibition is posthumous. Odell, known as Fran to those who knew her, was born in 1951 and died in 2022. Curated by Sam McGuire and Chloe Davies, the show focuses on her commissions for the Valleys Project — work McGuire discovered while researching a PhD on the project in the gallery's archive.

"What's so great about Odell's work is the way I believe she approached her practice," says McGuire. "I don't see her images as representations of the socio-economic context of that period. The works are embedded in that political moment, and they offer some form of commentary… but I see her works as photographs of people."

Odell came to photography late and almost by accident. After becoming a single parent, she took up her place in 1984 on the famous Diploma in Documentary Photography at Newport College of Art — the course set up by Magnum's David Hurn, designed around getting people into work in the photographic industry. She completed the course, won prestigious commissions, and then left professional photography entirely, spending her career as an archivist at the National Portrait Gallery.

Her own words, quoted by the gallery, describe her intent: "My pictures reflect my interest in people and the very different ways we have of coping with and enjoying life. I try to convey the essential humanity we share as individuals, despite sometimes very adverse situations, believing that through knowledge and understanding, we can come to a more tolerant attitude towards each other and, perhaps ultimately, change for the better."

The Newport course

'Doc Phot', as it was known, was remembered by former students as both diverse and elite. Photographers such as Martin Parr and Josef Koudelka would drop by. The small cohort ranged from Oxbridge graduates to people from 'back to work' programmes, chosen for their ideas over their images. The intensive two-year course required students to shoot and print work daily. Odell, leaving her three daughters with their father, moved alone to Newport and, in the words of the source, threw herself into it.

"There were very few postgraduate courses in the practice of photography [at that time], and absolutely none in documentary photography [except Newport]," says Daniel Meadows, who taught on the course. "It attracted an enormous range of different kinds of people to it."

Meadows remembers Odell as a talented, committed student he stayed in touch with. "She was always very intense, once you got into looking at the work. She was always very keen to make better pictures, but she would always interrogate your solutions to how she should go about stuff, she would challenge you…in a very polite way. So a good student, because that's the kind of student you want."

He recalls her projects on local female bodybuilders and a community at the local Turkish baths — a community he hadn't realised existed. Odell sought out stories that interested her, mostly around women, and built a bond of trust with her subjects that is palpable in the warmth and intimacy of her images.

Family and Sandy Lane

Odell's daughters — Naomi Fulford, Eleanor Thompson and Lorelei Mariner — were all under ten when her creative calling took hold. Too young to understand it then, they are now thrilled her work is being recognised. They feature regularly in her archive: she photographed them each time she returned to Sandy Lane, an alternative community in the Gower where she lived with them before Newport, and to which she returned after the course and again after retiring from the National Portrait Gallery. Her Sandy Lane photographs document people who chose a radical lifestyle during a period of great societal change.

"She had an intense interest in people and their lives and their livelihoods," says Fulford. "She would be incredibly empathetic, and just showed a real interest in what people did – whether it was on a grander scale or on the most simplistic level. She was able to bring people into her sphere and to engage with them at a really intimate level."

The Valleys Project

Odell's best-known work is the series of commissions she received through Ffotogallery's Valleys Project, which had a remit to capture "social, industrial and topographic change" in the South Wales valleys. The commission started in 1984, ran wide-ranging, included photographers such as David Bailey and Ron McCormick, and yielded an archive of roughly 450 images by ten image-makers. Odell's contribution stands out for its tenderness and its positive focus during a challenging period for many.

"There is an image called After the Night Feed that I was just completely enamoured with," McGuire recalls. "I'm a parent and the image captures such a recognisable feeling. There's something incredibly emotive about it, and the idea that a photographer had access to that moment was fascinating to me. I just set about a kind of exploration, 'Who was she? How did she get this access? How did she earn the trust of these subjects?' And then to find out that there is nothing written about her…"

That absence — nothing online except a staff photo from the NPG — led McGuire to centre Odell in her PhD, research that precipitated the Turner House show. "The sadness – but also the joy – of the exhibition is that it is able to give this snapshot of two-and-a-half years of a photographer's life," she says. "All of the projects [on show] are made in that period, and actually, it's probably a shorter period even than that. The images are all made from 1984 to 1985."

Paul Reas, who also shot on the Valleys Project and worked as a technician on the Doc Phot course while Odell studied, echoes the sentiment. He remembers her talent and her kindness, and notes that as a single parent in a fast-changing industry she had to choose stability over an unpredictable freelance career. He wishes she had lived to see the exhibition, calling it "a bittersweet moment".

Francesca Odell: Coping With and Enjoying Life – Photographs from South Wales 1983-1985 runs at The Turner House from 4 October to 8 November 2026. Ffoto Cymru runs at venues across Wales from 2 to 31 October 2026 under the theme 'There's More to Life'.