Photography was central  in Spence’s battle with cancer. When she was in hospital, she used the camera as visual documentation. The series of self-portraits The Picture of Health? began in 1982 and explored her personal experience with breast cancer in an extraordinarily raw, candid way.

“Because I am a photographer, I began to ask myself questions about the way disease and health are represented to us. Given that women are expected to be the object of the male gaze [...]  it seemed to me that the breast could be seen as a metaphor for our struggles. The fact that we have to worry about its size and shape as young women, its ability to give food when we become mothers, and its total dispensability when we are past child-bearing age, should be explored through visual representation as well as within health-care. The two should not be separated out in any way, as our concept of sexuality and our social identity stem from both lived experience and the imaginary self we carry in the mind's eye. Just as the female body is fragmented and colonized by advertisers in the search for new markets for products and is fetishized and offered for male consumption through pornography, so it is similarly fought over by competitors for its medical ‘care”.

-Jo Spence, 1986, Putting Myself in the Picture. London: Camden Press.

Her project became Photo Therapy: actively using photography to heal herself and address personal trauma. However, trying to understand her feelings while also creating a visual documentation that could be passed on  became a much larger endeavour. She noticed the lack of documentation of her own family history regarding mental and physical illness and decided that visually documenting her struggle for health was going to be important for the struggles others were making.

“Through photo therapy, I was able to explore how I felt about my powerlessness as a patient, my relationship to doctors and nurses, my infantilisation whilst being managed and ‘processed’ within a state institution, and my memories of my parents.

This work exists within a framework of debates on media studies, history, feminism, therapy and memory. The work takes up and questions many of the themes of photography itself, challenging the concept of the 'decisive' or 'perfect' moment, and the 'truth' of the photographed image. It exposes the image production process, working against the grain of existing mythologies, for example of family photographs, looking at everyday events and small details, challenging 'fixity' and rigid social roles. The work decodes sexuality and gendering and begins to show them as social constructs".

About the artist 

The photography of Jo SPENCE (British, 1934 - 1992) deals with issues of class, power and gender, death and dying. Spence began her career as a commercial photographer, specialising in family portraits and wedding photos. She pushed the medium beyond this narrow subject matter to explore its political function, challenging the social and structural barriers working against female artists of the time. Out of this emerged her collaborations with the Hackney Flashers, a collective of female documentary photographers. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1982, Spence later developed the technique of 'photo therapy,' using photography as a therapeutic tool to document her battle with the disease. 

Spence's work has featured in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including 'Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery,' Wellcome Collection, London (2019); Stills Gallery, Edinburgh (2016); 'All Men Become Sisters,' Muzeum Sztuki ms2, Lodz (2015); 'Tate Britain BP Spotlight,' London (2015); 'Not Yet,' Reina Sofia, Madrid (2015); 'Work (Part III): The History Lesson' at White Columns, New York (2013); Documenta 12, Kassel (2007); and 'Beyond the Perfect Image,' MACBA, Barcelona (2005), amongst others. Her work is included in numerous important collections such as: The Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; The Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, UK; MACBA | Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Amherst, MA, USA; MOMA | Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, CA, USA; Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, ON, Canada; Tate Collection, London, UK; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Wellcome Trust, London, UK, amongst many others.