Photography as autobiography. Jo Spence's visual narratives between art, activism, and therapy

Abstract

The focus on the woman’s body in contemporary art is an externalization of freedom (or at least a demand or aspiration for it), but it also represents an expression of the ‘biopower’ theorised by Michel Foucault, bringing the idea of a body that is dominated, abused and consumed. While this process can be hidden behind a perfect body, it becomes apparent when the body is problematic, ill, when it suffers from wounds and lacerations, or when it ages. As Susan Sontag lucidly observed in Malattia come metafora and as it was recently reiterated in Non morire by Pulizer Prize winner Anne Boyer, the annihilation of the woman’s body as a consequence of cancer is combined with its treatment as an impersonal entity. In this context, the role of documentary photography, in its most critical form, is fundamental to dismantle the mechanisms of power and change the perception of the effects of the disease on the woman's body. This is what the British photographer and writer Jo Spence did by means of a thorough deconstruction process. This work will analyse her work, from the series Beyond the Family Album, made between 1978 and 1979, in which she reconstructs traumatic events usually left out of family memories, to her works of the 1980s dedicated to courageously subverting the notion of an ideal female corporeity, as in Putting Myself in The Picture: a Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography, made in 1986.