British photographer and activist Jo Spence is being introduced to French audiences through her first monographic exhibition, organized by the Treize gallery in collaboration with exhibition curator Georgia René-Worms. The exhibition highlights Spence's groundbreaking work in using photography as both a political tool and therapeutic practice, particularly during her battles with breast cancer and leukemia in the 1980s and 1990s.
Author and curator Georgia René-Worms, who specializes in artistic practices related to illness and hormone-dependent pathologies, discovered Spence's work within this research context. Spence developed the concept of photo-therapy between the 1980s and 1990s while battling breast cancer and later leukemia, transforming art into a therapeutic tool for healing and empowerment.
Born in 1934 into a working-class family, Jo Spence taught herself photography while working as a secretary at a film development laboratory before opening her own studio. There, she created family portraits while observing how social representations saturated with stereotypes were constructed in front of the camera lens—stereotypes she would spend her life deconstructing. As a member of various collectives promoting militant photography, including the Hackney Flashers, Camerawork, and the Photography Workshop, Spence's work was deeply influenced by both feminism and Marxism.
Spence integrated these ideological frameworks into her approach to demystifying photography, which she conceived as a tool for political emancipation. At age 48, when diagnosed with breast cancer, she witnessed the devastating effects of the Thatcher government on the British healthcare system. As a woman, she also experienced infantilization by doctors, leading her to produce several series on the (re)construction of a sick and medicalized female body.
'How do I begin to take responsibility for my body?' she wrote with a marker on a body that she fragmented in a montage of photographic details. In another self-portrait, on a breast that was about to be removed, she proudly and fiercely displayed the inscription 'Property of Jo Spence.' This bold statement reclaimed ownership of her body in the face of medical objectification.
To respond to this traumatic medical experience, Jo Spence developed the concept of photo-therapy in collaboration with photographer Rosy Martin. In front of the camera, she reenacted scenes experienced in the hospital to reclaim her agency as a patient. Gradually, this practice expanded beyond the medical sphere to explore more broadly her personal history and identity as a woman subjected to gender and class archetypes, often using family photographs or repressed memories that she staged before the camera.
She documented and dissected this entire process in her scrapbooks—composite notebooks where photographs, press clippings, handwritten annotations, letters, photocopies, and postcards created a dialogue between artwork and intimate life. Spence produced forty of these scrapbooks, which the Centre Pompidou acquired in 2019 along with a collection of twenty-one works. These notebooks are reproduced and visible for the first time in the Treize exhibition space, alongside works loaned by the Richard Saltoun gallery and the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive at Birkbeck University, London.
The exhibition features not only traditional prints but mainly photographs glued to cardboard paper, accompanied by typed or handwritten texts, images collected from the press, and numerous laminates—plastified photomontages that the photographer circulated in a drawing portfolio. In conceiving this exhibition, the curators chose to remain faithful to the democratic and amateur vision that Jo Spence had of photography, making it accessible to all rather than elitist.
Jo Spence's final series, titled 'The Final Project,' was created just before her death in 1992. Suffering from leukemia, the photographer produced allegorical images haunted by death. She never lost her incisive and committed humor, which was the strength of her work and continues to resonate today. Her legacy demonstrates how personal struggle can be transformed into powerful political and artistic statement through the medium of photography.
The Jo Spence exhibition is a project by Georgia René-Worms in collaboration with Gallien Déjean and Emmanuel Guy. The gallery is open Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 2 PM to 7 PM, and by appointment at 24 rue Moret, 75011 Paris.
