Jo Spence: Work | Politics | Survival

Jo Spence’s work contributed to the multiple, yet marginalized voices using documentary photography as a critique of modernism in the context of socialist-feminism and the New Left in England in the 1970s. Spence and her primary collaborator, Terry Dennett, intentionally created and shaped their archive in London in the 1970s and 1980s as a resource for collaborative action—an ‘alternative institution’ that grew out of the 1960s and was characterized by political and ideological forms of opposition to dominant culture. While archives traditionally function as places where documents from the past go to be stored, preserved, and sometimes forgotten, they also legitimize dominant sets of values regarding what does, or does not, constitute the historical record. The central concerns of my dissertation ask how social discourses of the Art world, namely commercial galleries and institutional museum practices, have muted the radical impulse behind the photographic work of Spence, Dennett, and their collaborators. Additionally, it poses the question of whether formal archiving can preserve the anti-institutional motivation in Spence’s radical documentary photography, and if so, what strategies of engagement are necessary for doing so?

Beyond mere preservation, my methods of archival approach demonstrate how archival work can be utilized to rearticulate the polemic in Spence’s work in repositories holding elements of her Memorial Archive. The discursive context and function behind maintaining a repository in Spence’s name was to preserve and provide access for future political work. Therefore, archiving its material must account for and decipher the polemic contours of the material and render it legible in the institutions holding the archive today.

By examining two key projects as case studies as well as two elements of the largest repository of the Jo Spence Memorial Archive at The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University, my dissertation considers not only photography’s place within the polemics of 1970s and ‘80s Britain, but also whether its impact endures. First, it accounts for what made Spence’s practice radical; that is, how she borrowed from the worker photography movement of the 1920s and ‘30s to situate her work between the realms of socialist-feminist activism and Art. Secondly, my dissertation underscores the critical importance of understanding that Spence was not a self-proclaimed ‘artist’ first; she was initially known as a professional studio photographer in the 1960s and early 1970s, then an activist, educator, writer, community organizer, and socialist-feminist in the 1970s and ‘80s. Only over the last two decades has she become widely known in the Art world, especially for her phototherapy work made in the 1980s—work made with numerous individuals who collaborated with her in various ways, circulating work that was made for multiple uses in various innovative formats. By extension, the third aspect of my dissertation addresses Spence’s work in its contemporary institutionalized contexts and highlights that once institutionalized, the tactile, hands-on use value of it is lost to the logic of museum protocol, institutional handling, and preservation practices. This aspect, therefore, mobilizes methods of archival engagement that function as a strategy to tip the scale that gives disproportionate weight to her work as newly discovered within categories of feminist Art and ‘postmodernism.’