Jo Spence

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Jo Spence (born June 15, 1934 in London , † May 1992 ibid) was a British photographer.

life and work

Jo Spence was born in 1934 as a working class child and had her own photo studio from 1967 to 1974, in which she mainly devoted herself to portrait and wedding photography. In the 1970s she began specializing in self-portraits. In 1974, Spence was instrumental in founding Hackney Flashers , a socialist-feminist women's collective. In cooperation with the Half Moon Gallery , she brought out the magazine Camerawork in 1976 . Spence began to become increasingly politically active and turned his back on commercial photography while she focused on documentary photography. She made her living as a secretary at the British Film Institute .

In 1979 she began studying photography at the Polytechnic of Central London . One of their professors was Victor Burgin . Spence graduated with honors, changed the way she worked, and moved into the issues of domesticity and family life.

In 1982, Jo Spence found out she had cancer. This diagnosis changed her photography again. She began to deal with identity, subjectivity, and mental and physical health. She photographed her own disease, breast cancer . Your most famous photo series, The Picture of Health? (1982–1986), was created.

“In the work of the photographer Jo Spence you can find political and educational approaches up to stagings and the phototherapy she developed. (...) Spence, who died of cancer, turned photography into a means of rebellion and therapy, with which she bravely campaigned against the pathologies that are reproduced by the images prevalent in culture. "

With her partner Terry Dennett, Jo Spence dealt with social and cultural-historical concepts of femininity in the joint project Remodelling Photo History (1980–1982). Remodelling Photo History was exhibited at documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007 .

literature

  • Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography by Jo Spence, Camden Press, December 4, 1986 (English) ISBN 978-0-94849-1-146
  • Cultural sniping: the art of transgression by Jo Spence, Routledge, June 1995 (English), ISBN 978-0-41508-8-848

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Archives hub Jo Spence Collection , accessed April 7, 2016.
  2. dazed Confronting, intimate, honest and uncomfortable accessed on April 7, 2016 (English)
  3. http://www.jospence.org/picture_of_health/p_o_h_1.html (English)
  4. ^ Documenta 12 catalog, 2007, page 348, ISBN 978-3-8228-1677-6
  5. documenta 12 catalog, 2007, page 116, ISBN 978-3-8228-1677-6