Putting Myself in The Picture: a Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography – Jo Spence

By placing at the center of her work this still shocking fact of being an author, a woman, endowed with a body that, as a woman’s one, is problematic, Spence stands in complete contradiction to the intrinsic approach to the history of photography, which often catalogues photographers by isolating them from their cultural and political context, assuming that most of the time they work alone, closed in their studios, surrounded by a mythical halo of creativity. Her work is not linear, it cannot be placed on a timeline, she has no interest in cataloguing, it is intertwined, dirty, a clear symbol of the changes of thought that have characterized the author, like any other human being, during the course of her life.

Even calling his battle against breast cancer “phototherapy” is reductive: Spence uses his camera as a tool to document the course of the disease, to stay attached to life, but above all to courageously subvert the notion of an ideal female body.

Jo Spence’s one could be defined as a lifelong study of how photography works in the construction of age, social class, and gender-based identity. The question, which will constantly accompany her practice, is: how can individuals, of any age, gender, gender, use photography to self-representation and, above all, to take control of their visual narratives?