A Daughter’s View: The Photography of Jo Spence and Rosy Martin is an exhibition of work by Rosy Martin (b.1946, London) and Jo Spence (b.1934 – 1992, Camden, London) who worked together from 1984, developing a new photographic practice focused on portraiture and identity studies.
Rosy Martin is an artist using self-portraiture, still life photography and video, and as a photographer/therapist to extend the range of potential meanings within notions of domestic photography and to explore the relationships between photography, memory, identities and unconscious processes. Starting in 1983, working with the late Jo Spence, her work evolved and developed a new photographic practice – phototherapy – based upon re-enactment. She explores the relationships between photography, memory, identities and unconscious processes using self-portraiture, still-life photography, digital imaging and video.
Jo Spence (b1934 – 1992, Camden, London) was a British photographer, writer, cultural worker, and photo therapist. She began her career in commercial photography but soon started her agency that specialised in family portraits and wedding photos. In the 1970s, she refocused her work towards documentary photography, adopting a politicised approach to her art form, with socialist and feminist themes revisited throughout her career. Later self-portraits focused on her fight with breast cancer, depicting various stages of her condition to subvert the notion of an idealised female form, inspired projects in ‘photo therapy’, a means of using the medium to work on psychological health.
Key figures in the debates around photography and the critique of representation and feminism that took place in the seventies and eighties. Their collaborative work, in which they were the photographic subject and the photographer/therapist has been extensively shown internationally. Through embodiment, they explore the psychic and social construction of identities within the drama of the everyday. Their work makes explicit the multiplicity of identities that an individual inhabits, using the ‘self’ as a text to be deconstructed, reviewed, challenged and reconsidered. Bridging private and public discourses, theory and practice. Themes explored in exhibitions include – gender, sexuality, ageing, class, desire, memory, location, urbanism, shame, family dynamics, power/powerlessness, health and disease, bereavement, grief, loss and reparation.
Their work evolved and developed a new photographic practice – phototherapy – based upon re-enactment. An extraordinary series of narrative portraits both as themselves at various times in their lives and as members of their families. Work as a form of visual story-telling, creating shift narrative sequences like dream fragments. Other work takes an existing portrait and opens out the single image, re-imagining what went before and after the chosen moment and what feelings and memories lie masked within. Exploring the ‘minefield of personal memory’ which can then be put back into a wider context. In this sense, it differs from community photography where an outside agent is the catalyst for groups/individuals to use photography as a social or political tool.
A Daughter’s View: The Photography of Jo Spence and Rosy Martin was produced and exhibited at Watershed Media Department Photographic Gallery, with support from Arts Council England.
