Spence, Jo 1934-1992

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SPENCE, Jo 1934-1992

PERSONAL: Born June 15, 1934, in South Woodford, Essex, England; died of cancer June 24, 1992, in England.

CAREER: Photographer. Exhibitions: Solo exhibitions include Silent Health, Camera Work Gallery, London, England, 1991; Missing Persons/Damaged Lives, Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds, England, 1991; and Jo Spence: Matters of Concern Collaborative Images 1982-1992, Festival Hall, London, England and Impressions Gallery, York, England, 1994.

Group exhibitions include Beyond the Family Album, Cockpit Gallery, London, England, 1979; The Picture of Health, Photography Workshop, London, England, 1985; and Exploring the Unknown Self, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan, 1991.

WRITINGS:

(Editor with Patricia Holland and Simon Watney) Photography/Politics, Boyars (New York, NY), 1986.

Putting Myself in the Picture, Camden (London, England), 1986.

(Editor with Patricia Holland) Family Snaps: TheMeaning of Domestic Photography, Virago (London, England), 1991.

(With Joan Solomon) What Can a Woman Do with aCamera?: A Handbook of Photography for Women, Open Letters (London, England), 1993.

Cultural Sniping: The Art of Transgression, Routledge (New York, NY), 1995.

TELEVISION PROGRAMS

Opening up the Family Album, produced Channel 4, 1988.

Tip of the Iceberg, 1989.

Video Diary, British Broadcasting Corporation, 1991.

SIDELIGHTS: Remembered internationally for photographic studies documenting her decade-long battle with breast cancer, Jo Spence intended her so-called "camera-therapy" photos to record her experience, and invite viewers to confront death-and disease-related issues. Spence died in 1992—her mother also had died of breast cancer years earlier. In the preface to the artist's exhibition "Jo Spence: The Healing Camera," Hagiwara Hiroko wrote, "The photos urge us to see highly social issues, how this society deals with a woman's body, cultural implications . . . and medical professionalism and authoritarianism. Spence's insightful social criticism and search for survival as a dignified person provide us with power."

Already known for her honest, often humorous, approach to art, Spence, upon her diagnosis, began diligently reviewing her life. She had been born into a working-class home and was grateful for her strong education. She launched her career as a studio photographer in Hampstead, England. She felt thankful, in some ways, for middle-class boyfriends even if they dumped her in the end, because they elevated her quality of life. Still, her battle with asthma and numerous other personal hardships had taken their toll.

Contributing a paper on Spence's camera-therapy to the magazine Afterimage, Spence's partner and longtime collaborator, Terry Dennett, broke down the photographer's complex "final-decade" process for readers. According to Dennett, Spence was inspired, in building her camera-therapy project, by a 1979 book by Augusto Boal, The Theatre of the Oppressed, which details the experimental Workers Theatre, Film, and Photo Movements. At the same time, Dennett explained, Spence took interest in alternative medicine, and was frustrated by her limited access in England to certain procedures.

Dennett wrote, "With no professional rules to guide her, Spence had to 'hand-make' her cancer survival and camera-therapy program. Unable to gain easy access to medical libraries she was also forced to gather most of her survival materials from outside of conventional medicine."

In the early 1970s, Spence and Dennett established a grass-roots teaching organization, Photography Workshop Ltd., to provide artists a forum for discussing socially relevant photography and photographic history. Spence looked to this group for inspiration. According to Dennett, a quote by Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel sums up one of the basic tenets of the group: "The intellectual should constantly disturb, should bear witness to the misery of the world, should be provocative by being independent, should rebel against all hidden and open pressure and manipulations, should be the chief doubter of systems, of power and its incantations, should be a witness to their mendacity."

In 1986, as part of her camera therapy, Spence published the book, Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal, and Photographic Autobiography, detailing her hospitalization and lumpectomy operation."In that work," Dennett observed, "she explained that none of her previous projects on selfimage and body politics prepared her for the problems of life-threatening illness."

According to Dennett, Spence's photos from this phase can be described as autobiographic portrayal, done with a "dramatological" approach. One example, "Framing My Breast," shows Spence's nude breast the night before the hospital visit.

In 1994 a posthumous exhibition, "Jo Spence: Matters of Concern, Collaborative Images 1982-1992" was presented at Festival Hall in London, and at the Impressions Gallery in New York. Val Williams wrote in New Statesman and Society, "Spence clowned her way through photography, appearing as a dowdy fairy, a screaming bride, a disconsolate baby sucking on a dummy. She posed naked in a motorcycle helmet, displaying a recent breast operation, and pinned a placard to her fairy's costume advertising herself as a photographer 'available for divorces, funerals, illnesses, social injustice, scenes of domestic violence, explorations of sexuality, and any joyful events."

Spence was featured in several television programs including, Putting Ourselves in the Picture—the Work of Jo Spence, produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation. She co-edited Family Snaps: The Meaning of Domestic Photography, with Patricia Holland. What Can a Woman Do with a Camera?: A Handbook of Photography for Women, is a book of open letters. Reviewing Cultural Sniping: The Art of Transgression for Signs, Elspeth Probyn remarked, "If much of Spence's work tended to be quite brutal, but also lyrical, in its immediacy, these collected essays remind us of the sophisticated intellectual work that went on in the elaboration of Spence's photographs. Against the facile dismissal of the early period of feminist cultural analysis of the 'images of women'. . . it is salutary to remember that the interventions of Spence and others served to reconceptualize the links between class and the psychic and social construction of femininity that fueled the deconstructive work that 'images of women' compelled."

Spence's work has been exhibited in many spaces, including Leeds City Art Gallery, Gallery d'Art Santa Monica, Barcelona, and Tokyo's Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

Established in 1992, the Jo Spence Memorial Archive serves as a source of print information and photography for students completing projects, theses, or research related to Spence or to experimental photography.