Jo Spence

Remodelling Photo History
Photography 1982


© Foto: Jo Spence + Terry Dennett

*1934 in London (UK), †1992 in London (UK)
The works of photographer Jo Spence are political, educational tableaux. In them, she examines intensively the construction of social identities and the possibilities of reclaiming images. Spence, who died of cancer, turned photography into a means of rebellion and therapy, with which she bravely held forth against the pathologies (re)produced by the images of the dominant culture.

Remodelling Photo History (1982) makes daily, institutionalized and normalized practices and codes seem strange. The cooperation between Jo Spence and Terry Dennett questions both historical and contemporary genres of photography and the depiction of the female body. The photo series is structured into visual chapters such as Industrialization, Colonization, Regulation, Victimization, Realization and Revisualization, exposing photographic genres and the ways in which they are utilized.

The group of works The Picture of Health was created 1982–1986 in cooperation with Rosy Martin, Maggie Murray and Terry Dennett. In this series, Spence forcefully thematizes her illness, breast cancer. She criticizes the way society deals with illness and draws her person into the focus of attention. In this way, she defends herself against the “minefield of silence“ and against the ill individual’s loss of control. There is almost nothing like illness to make us so conscious of the value of life itself.