eral years she ran her own portrait and wedding
studio in London. Her move into a more theorized
and political practice began in the 1970s when she
met photographer Terry Dennett, her partner for
many years, with whom she set up Photography
Workshop in 1975. They joined the left-wing Half
Moon Gallery in the East End of London and were
instrumental in setting up the critical magazine
Camerawork. When the two organizations split,
Photography Workshop set up its own publishing
project,Photography/Politics.
By this time, Spence was also working with the
Hackney Flashers, a collective of socialist feminist
photographers, who produced exhibitions on
women’s issues. In 1979, she enrolled on a degree
course in Film and Photographic Arts at the Poly-
technic of Central London, then headed by Victor
Burgin and with a reputation as the leading institu-
tion in theoretical approaches to photography. She
had also started investigating her own background
by using her family photographs to question the
conventions of the family photograph and to argue
that the family album hides more truths than it
reveals and constructs a myth of the happy family.
Her autobiographical work, Beyond the Family
Album, which focused on these limitations, was
shown at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1979,
and it became part of a storm of controversy. This
focused both on the subject matter and the appar-
ent ordinariness of Spence’s imagery, which was
seen as unsuitable for an art gallery.
In 1982, the year she left college, Spence discov-
ered that she had breast cancer, the disease which
had killed her mother. It was this discovery that
was to change her life and her work most radically.
Spence had been active in challenging modes of
representation and in questioning the power rela-
tions set up by documentary photography; she now
found she needed to find new ways of representing
what was happening in her own life and to chal-
lenge her role as victim of the medical establish-
ment. Typical of this work is the 1982 self-portrait,
in which she has marked her left breast ‘‘property
of Jo Spence,’’ which she took into hospital as a
talisman. Of the images made at this time, she said:
I had used my own body to make statements about the
history of the nude. But that was totally different—the
body I put up on the wall then was not diseased and
scarred. Those nudes had been about ideological things.
Cancer was about my own history. So taking this step
was profoundly difficult for me.Spence finally found the new method that she
was to use in all her later work when, in 1983 while
exploring different alternative therapies, she met
Rosy Martin on a co-counselling course. Together,
they developed the practice of phototherapy in
which family and other dramas are revisited and
restaged for the camera. Their aim was to ‘‘repre-
sent what has hitherto been conceived of as unre-
presentable,’’ and they described the process as
‘‘serious playing’’ and ‘‘the making visible of psy-
chic reality.’’
Spence subsequently used phototherapy with a
range of health practitioners, friends, colleagues,
students, and her partner, David Roberts, to pro-
duce a body of work that is remarkable for its
honesty and insight. In working collaboratively
and using the most basic photographic technology,
she consciously opened her practice to anyone,
amateur or professional, who might be interested
in using her methods for their own work.
She became well known and was very active for a
number of years, speaking about her work, touring
Australia and the United States, and becoming
involved in a number of television programs made
about her work. But by the end of 1990, Spence
had developed leukaemia, and her breast cancer
had recurred. Nonetheless, she continued to work
up to the time of her death, making photographs
and exhibitions, and collating material for her
(posthumous) bookCultural Sniper. She made a
Video Diary for television with her brother,
Michael Clode. Even while she was in a hospice,
she continued to take photographs of her visitors
and work on her projects. A month before her
death, she married Roberts and arranged to set
up The Jo Spence Memorial Archive with her
long-time colleague, Terry Dennett, which con-
tinues to promote and tour her work.
ShirleyRead
Seealso:Burgin, Victor; Family Photography; Fem-
inist Photography; Heartfield, John (Helmut Herz-
felde); Vernacular Photography; Worker PhotographyBiography
Born Joan Clode in South Woodford, Essex June 15, 1934.
Family subsequently moved to London. Evacuated to
Cornwall and then Derbyshire, 1940. Trained as a secre-
tary, 1948–1950. A typist and then studio manager at
Photo Coverage and industrial photographer Barnet
Saidman and freelance printing work, 1951–1962. Assis-
tant to advertising photographer Walter Curtin, 1962–- Married Keith Holland, worked as a farm secre-
tary, 1964. Changed name to Spence while living with
Neil Spence, 1966. Ran Joanna Spence Associates, por-
trait and wedding studio in London, 1967–1974. Photo-
graphic projects with Childrens Rights Workshop, 1970– - Founded Photography Workshop with Terry Den-
nett, 1975. Joined Half Moon Gallery, which became
SPENCE, JO