Fairy Tales and Photography, or another look at Cinderella – Jo Spence

In “Fairy Tales and Photography, or Another Look at Cinderella,” we are invited to browse through Jo Spence’s ambitious and irreverent 1982 dissertation, which asks, “When we take a fairytale like Cinderella from an archive, from a shelf, in a store, how can we ignore its implicit references to class theory, its political and social significance?”

The thesis is rooted in the biography of a woman born into a working class family and foreshadows, still unconsciously, her battle with cancer and mental illness, always with a keen eye for how all of our lives are irrevocably affected by power structures.

It is in these very pages that Jo Spence sows the seeds of the key themes that will characterize her future career. If her discomfort and distrust previously floated superficially around the norms and patterns of society, here they crystallize into powerful arguments.
The Cinderella fairy tale is then a pretext for exploring social dynamics within families, social classes, and nations.