Jo Spence Memorial Archive Richard Saltoun Gallery, London
Exhibitions
Jo Spence : from Fairy Tales to Phototherapy. Photographs from the Hyman Collection, Arnolfini Bristol, (18th May 2020 - 20th June 2021) (this print)
'The 80s: Photographing Britain' at Tate Britain: 21 November 2024 - 5 May 2025
Literature
Jo Spence, Putting myself in the picture: A political, personal, and photographic autobiography, 1986, p.130 (titled Revisualisation)
Jo Spence. Collaboration with Terry Dennett Stamped Photography Workshop and annotated verso Alternatvely titled Remodelling Photo History (Revisualisation) in Jo Spence's autobiography, Putting Myself in the Picture, 1986, p.131. Siona...
Alternatvely titled Remodelling Photo History (Revisualisation) in Jo Spence's autobiography, Putting Myself in the Picture, 1986, p.131.
Siona Wilson in her reading of Remodelling Photo History identifies the comic aspect of Spence's maternity image and discusses it in terms of the depiction of woman as a modern Madonna.(1) Her discussions focuses on this aspect but the work also wittily addresses comedy and masculinity. In 1982 the image was not only presented as part of RemodellingPhoto History, as published in Screen magazine and discussed by Wilson, but also appears in Spence's unpublished thesis Cinderella.(2) There it is placed as the culmination of a section devoted to male figures in fairy-tales. The section is a humorous digression from the main thesis, and appropriately takes as its title "and now for something completely different", a popular line from the British satiric television show, Monty Python. The image ends the section and follows a series of illustrations from children's story books of heroic figures. After this fairy-tale build up the impact of this show-stopping image is increased by its disproportionately enlarged picture-size, compared to the preceding pages of images, and by its placing at the end of the sequence so as to deflate the pretensions of a procession of heroic male archetypes. Appropriately it appears beneath a quotation from Sigmund Freud.
(2) Jo Spence, "Fairy Tales and Photography... or, another look at Cinderella", unpublished undergraduate thesis, Polytechnic of Central London, 1982. (Hyman Collection).