Jo Spence: The Unknown Recordings Gives Voice to a Pioneer

Jo Spence: The Unknown Recordings, a 256-page collection of intimate interview transcripts with the late British photographer, was published by Museums etc on 1 January, priced at £35 in paperback and £25 as an e-book. The book contains 30 colour and 8 black-and-white illustrations.

Spence (1934-92) was a London-born and based photographer, writer, class and health activist and educator. She is best known for challenging the assumptions of what photography could be, using her own image to question common tropes around female beauty, health, identity and societal expectations. Her achievements centred on the small home and studio on Islington's Upper Street that she shared with her partner and collaborator Terry Dennett (1938-2018).

The Unknown Recordings is an intimate self-portrait in text form. There are pictures, but surprisingly few. In that respect, Spence's disarmingly frank autobiography Putting Myself in the Picture (1986) could not be surpassed. Forty years on, this publication makes sense of a textual account largely built from transcripts of key historic recordings made with the artist.

What do the transcripts contain?

The verbatim transcript of Spence's interview for the British Library's Oral History of British Photography, recorded in 1991, runs to more than 100 pages. It covers every aspect of her life:

• Childhood experiences and early working life
• Her photographic work, collaborations and politics
• Her experience of breast cancer and leukaemia

The conversation between Spence and the interviewer flows, with few fragments and diversions, in a manner that allows the reader almost to hear it. Generous in sharing extremely personal ideas and experiences, Spence does not shy away from difficult topics, least of all her chronic illness and her attempts to regain power over her own body and identity. Her friendship with artist Rosy Martin and their development of phototherapy, a form of psychological therapy centred on photography, is described as especially raw.

The transcript of a short personal recording made in 1982, after the breast cancer diagnosis, is more unsettling. This is Spence recording her own thoughts, filled with distress, tears and self-analysis. While it became part of her archive and she often blurred the line between private and public, reading it feels a little like eavesdropping. Recorded over two days, it is intensely emotional, as Spence struggles to process and come to terms with the various stressors in her life. In one poignant moment, Dennett is recorded shouting words of support, presumably from another room.

How political was her practice?

Spence's interview with visual activist and educator Andrew Dewdney and curator Shirley Read, recorded at the Cockpit Arts Workshop in London in 1989, has a political slant. It gives acute insight into Spence's commitment to a political as well as photographic practice. The conversation ranges across the Photography Workshop, Hackney Flashers, Half Moon Photography Workshop and Camerawork magazine. These projects perhaps coalesced around Spence's focus on people's right to speak and be seen.

Four appendices act as a postscript to Spence's voice:

• Documentation of her sacking from Half Moon over ideological differences
• Recently discovered images of Spence's retrospective of 1994
• Photographs, thoughts and exchanges with artist Pru Clements
• Spence's CV from March 1987

This section also includes Dennett's reworked introduction to Putting Myself in the Picture. He makes clear that Spence worked under difficult circumstances but remained focused on the importance of empowering others. Rather than concluding, these documents point the reader to further archival material surrounding her life and legacy. Spence extended the possibilities of photography to speak about the unspeakable and photograph the unphotographable. She stood outside the cultural elite, but found a way to tell her own story and hoped it would serve as a model for others to follow.