Jo Spence’s “The Project Remains Incomplete”

One small room can encompass not only an entire life and career but also the sociopolitical context of an era. This is certainly true of this show, which restages a presentation of photographer Jo Spence’s work titled “art — photography — therapy,” curated in 2008 in Finland by her longtime collaborator Terry Dennett sixteen years after Spence died. Augmented by vital archival material, the photographs shown here were found in “a battered portfolio,” per the press materials, in the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive at Birkbeck, University of London. Instead of traditional wall texts and captions is a handout of contextualizing quotes taken from book chapters, magazine and journal articles, and archive folders.

The show reminds the viewer that Spence saw herself not simply as a photographer but as a “cultural sniper.” The first images of the exhibition, from “Remodeling Photo History” (1981–82), show how Spence and Dennett, a photographer and community activist to whom Spence left her archive and who subsequently gave it to Birkbeck, disrupted tropes, especially those of the family album. Influenced by the work of Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal, this work looks beyond the image to a deeper, sometimes darker truth, investigating class, gender, and the sociopolitical issues beneath the usual smiles and celebrations archived in our family albums.

In 1982, after her breast cancer diagnosis and confrontation with medical protocols of that time, Spence created some of her most powerful images, many from within the hospital, where photography was not allowed. “The Cancer Project” (1982) includes images such as I Framed My Breast for Posterity, in which Spence holds an empty frame over her breast before her hospital admission. The quotes about this work included in the handout are from her “My Cancer Photo Diary,” a typescript from the archive, in which she mentions an “emotional questioning 100 of her ‘cancer sisters’” about mastectomy versus lumpectomy, the consensus being that both had an equal chance of success. According to Dennett, Spence states: “I frame my breast the night before going into hospital—will the surgeon get his way and ‘take it off’ or will I get my wish for a Lumpectomy?”1 Paired to the disturbing image of a sharp knife below her breast, the question attests to Spence’s distrust of doctors and the medical-industrial system.

In “Example of Camera Therapy Work” (1982, titled by Dennett), Spence collages text next to two images: “Im supposed to feel as a sick person” placed next to a bedraggled self-portrait; below this and next to a proud shirtless portrait, she writes how wearing dark glasses to hide her “baggy eyes” subverts the expectation of how she is “supposed to look when sick,” whereas “PhotoTherapy gives me the strength to imagine a future without illness.”

A vitrine between the two walls of work contains photos of Barbie-like dolls deformed by mastectomy, including one where a knife similar to the one used in the image of Spence’s pre-hospital stay is poised to cut into the doll. Also included are the dolls themselves, two in diapers and one in an orange one-piece bathing suit with a shoulder strap lowered to reveal where the breast once was, now only a hole looking like a wounded stand-in for a nipple. This small collection of maimed dolls not only makes disturbingly clear the damage caused by medical procedures but also denotes a violent end of innocence.

Also in this vitrine are the two typewritten sheets of paper, typos and all, which are considered Spence’s artistic will: directions to Dennett, who she calls her “little treasure,” on how to archive and show her work after her death. Spence speaks directly to her wishes that posthumous exhibitions of her work be held as they mostly were in her lifetime, at community and educational centers, rather than commercial art galleries. Her trust in Dennett is affecting.

The last images in the show are from “The Final Project” (1991–92), which Spence created after her leukemia diagnosis. Some of a collection of “Specimen Jars,” each filled with murky liquid, display earlier images pasted inside the containers. A few have handwritten labels reading: “Spence.” On the side of these is a dog-eared paperback of a book titled A Dictionary of Biology. In his 2001 essay “The Wounded Photographer: The Genesis of Jo Spence’s Camera Therapy,” quoted in the exhibition handout, Dennett writes that leukemia was “a difficult illness to depict” for Spence, who “did not look ill in the early stages” but rather, as she put it to him, “just pale and interesting.” Spence’s two attempts to photograph herself in the graveyard “resulted in emotional upset and discarded pictures,” Dennett writes.

What remains instead are enduring and resonant images such as Fighting Leukemia (Spence’s title) or Trying to Fight Leukemia (Dennett’s), made between 1991 and ’92, in which multi-exposure is used to show Spence in a rust-colored dress, a matching handbag slung over a shoulder, facing what seems to be a wall of magnified purplish blood cells: Spence’s arms are outstretched as if trying to organize them. Her shadow emphasizes her grasping fingers, a Sisyphean attempt to tame an untamable disease. A major theme of the show—and of Spence’s career—reaches a climax in this photo. Who controls not only an individual’s narrative, but also that of photography itself? 

The final, double-exposed images show Spence dressed in a blue smock walking across a narrow wooden plank over a too-green body of water, toward an open pasture; Spence in a blue one-piece bathing suit floating in water and what looks like a plowed field of what could be lavender; and Spence in the same swimsuit, here rendered darker, floating among rocks and what could be waves or clouds.

“The Project Remains Incomplete,” succeeds by following Spence’s wishes: “I don’t want to end up as an ‘Art Gallery Hack’ my work will be sterilized if it is shown out of context—so ‘little treasure’ keep it polemical.” By illuminating her collaborations and the importance of archives, this compelling exhibition shows that Spence still floats among us. She was able in her own style to capture—to rescue—her narrative, despite eventually succumbing, as all of us do, to death.