jo spence - beyond the family album
Jo Spence, Beyond the Family Album: a primer
David Evans
Beyond the Family Album is a touring exhibition by Jo Spence (1934-92). It was originally part of an Arts Council survey called Three Perspectives on Photography (The Hayward Gallery, London, 1979) and was recently shown at Belfast Exposed. The work is over twenty five years old, but remains resonant. My primer identifies themes that were important for Jo when she made this exhibition, presented as a series of loosely connected fragments.
Amateur
The amateur and the professional are often considered opposites. One works for love; the other for money. One can be untroubled by incompetence; the other claims competence by definition and can use the adjective amateurish as a term of denigration. Jo rejected these ‘commonsense’ distinctions. She was a professional – in the sixties and early seventies she made her living as a high street photographer in Hampstead, specializing in portraiture and weddings – but she came to value the amateur highly. Indeed, when asked about political photography in the early eighties, she replied that her main interest was ‘a radicalized type of amateurism.’ (Camerawork 29, Winter 1983/84) Amateurs were the target audience of her first book - Photography. Co-authored with Richard Greenhill and Margaret Murray, it was published in 1977 as part of a series called Macdonald Guidelines that aimed to offer short, lively introductions to a wide range of topics from astrology to yoga. It is very different from conventional photographic manuals for the novice. These tend to be by and for men, usually proffering a heady mix of technical information and the wisdom distilled from a lifetime in the business. In contrast, the authors of Photography seek to avoid gender bias, keep the technical sections to a minimum, and play down their own professional track records. ‘Why photography?’ is the opening chapter and the first paragraph begins disarmingly: Much mystique surrounds the techniques and professional practices of photography, whereas in reality the basic craftsmanship involved is quite easy to learn. What many people find difficult is knowing what they want to say and discovering a means of saying it through pictures. What ensues in a less than a hundred pages is a clear and concise exposition of conventional uses of photography and some suggestions for radical alternatives. Significantly, there is a section called ‘Snaps’ which takes family photography seriously. There are no hints on how to raise the technical standards of the family album. Rather, the authors encourage reflection on the meaning of such albums, for ‘only recently have people begun to realize the value of snapshots and family albums as a valuable source of personal and historical information.’
Art
Not ‘Is it art?’ Rather, ‘Who is it for?’ These questions were the core of the statement of aims of the Half Moon Photography Workshop, an organization committed to using photography for social change. (Camerawork 1, February 1976) Set up in the East End of London in Autumn 1975, it was mainly a gallery, magazine and programme of educational workshops. Jo was a founding member and wrote the lead article for the first issue of the magazine Camerawork. Entitled ‘The Politics of Photography’, it elaborates on the Workshop’s mission statement, with dismissive remarks about commercial photography and photojournalism and an emphasis on the prospects for radical community photography. Also in 1976, photographer William Eggleston had his now legendary solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The accompanying catalogue – William Eggleston’s Guide – was later to be listed as a book received (Camerawork 7, July 1977) but was not reviewed. My point is not that the Half Moon failed to recognize Eggleston as a seminal figure in contemporary art photography, but that the collective was indifferent or hostile to MOMA as ‘The Judgement Seat of Photography’. (Christopher Phillips,’The Judgement Seat of Photography’, October 30, Fall 1982) Jo’s lack of interest in the agenda of John Szarkowski, chief photographic curator at MOMA, did not preclude a passionate engagement with other aspects of art and photography. In the seventies, she became very interested in the revolutionary cultures of the early Soviet Union and Weimar Germany, particularly those aspects that dealt with the potential of new media like cinema and illustrated press to radically transform the everyday lives of working people. (For her and many others, the film theory journal Screen was essential reading for materials on the historic avant- gardes of Central and Eastern Europe.) Above all, the German photomontage artist John Heartfield became a constant source of inspiration for Jo, especially after she saw an exhibition of his work at the ICA, London, in the late seventies. (Eckhard Siepmann’s catalogue was the subject of an appreciative essay in Creative Camera 305, August/September 1990.) Yet she was not uncritical of Heartfield and always made a sharp distinction between the useful and the useless. She had little time for the celebratory pro-Soviet stuff, but she was fascinated by the anti-Fascist photomontages of the thirties that used irony, vulgarity and played with contradiction. In the seventies, she was also very curious about contemporary artists who resisted the idea of art as a collection of visual artefacts to be collected, displayed and contemplated, and who adopted radical alternatives like writing or ephemeral performance. For such artists – for convenience, let’s call them Conceptualists - one of the few concession to visual representation involved the use of the camera as an informal recording instrument, considered permissible because of photography’s marginality in the museum, and its pervasiveness in everyday culture. Take Victor Burgin, another contributor to Three Perspectives. Trained in fine art at The Royal College of Art and Yale, his formation was quite different from that of Jo Spence, former high street photographer. But she was quick to identify mutual concerns – the visual rhetoric of the advertisement, for instance - and asked him to write an article for Camerawork . (Victor Burgin, ‘Art, Commonsense and Photography,’ Camerawork 3, July 1976) Subsequently their paths were to cross many times, not always without friction. Victor Burgin and John Heartfield: for me, the two artists who gave Jo the confidence to find her own way of working with photographic documents that did not end up looking like mainstream documentary photography.
Education
One the inside cover of Photography, Jo is described as being ‘particularly interested in the development of photography as a critical tool in education.’ Along with Terry Dennett, she was also a leading force behind the educational activities of the Half Moon Photography Workshop whose statement of aims included a commitment to ‘initiate projects and promote interests in the use of photography as an educational tool, particularly in the field of play, literacy and schooling.’ (Camerawork 1, February 1976) A detailed exposition of their work in this area became the article ‘Photography, Ideology and Education’ (Screen Education 21, Winter 1976/77). Note that this article and the Macdonald book both suggest projects on identity scrapbooks and visual life-lines. For example, one suggestion in Photography starts: Sort out all the pictures in which you feature. Then, arrange them in date order (starting with the earliest on the left- hand side) in a long line across the room. In this way you can plot out a visual progression of the physical changes, fashions, styles etc. through which you have passed. There is an obvious link between the above brief and Beyond the Family Album. Jo often described herself as an educational photographer and once explained: ’The term comes straight out of Brecht. My understanding of Brecht’s work is that it could be educational and entertaining at the same time …’ (John Roberts,’Interview with Jo Spence’, Selected Errors: Writings on Art and Politics 1981-90, London, Pluto Press, 1992) As I cite her words, an image goes through my mind of Jo arriving at an adult evening class in the early eighties with her camera lens protected by a condom – discrete advice for male photographers, perhaps. Jo was a joker. She loved disguises, mockery, permanent carnival. She was also an educationalist in the way she was always keen to take on new roles and to encourage others to do the same. For instance, the journal Camerawork was initially an opportunity for practising photographers to put pen to paper, and Photography was co-produced by a trio of photographers who wrote the text and supplied most of the images. But a more adventurous example of what I have in mind was the anthology Photography/Politics: One (Photography Workshop,1979). Photography Workshop was basically Terry Dennett and Jo Spence, operating from their small flat above a shop in Islington. In their spare time, the two of them (with help from assistants, including myself) worked as publishers, editors, designers and contributing writers. Note, too, that both were trying their hand for the first time at academic history writing, albeit from a partisan perspective, on interwar Worker Photography in Britain (Dennett) and images of women in World War Two (Spence). Overall, the production of Photography/Politics: One was a conscious defiance of traditional divisions of labour, with everyone involved passing on skills and learning new ones. Brecht again, I might add - the Brecht of the Lehrstücke , the teaching and learning plays of 1929 and 1930, aimed at revolutionary students and workers, that sought to dispense with traditional notions of professional playwright, professional actors and appreciative audience.
Politics
Jo was a Socialist Feminist. She had sympathies with artists and photographers who tried to directly service political causes: Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson, for example, who made issue-based posters with the collaboration of campaigning community groups in London’s Docklands, or Peter Kennard, well known for his anti-nuclear photomontages for CND. She also had sympathies with figures like Victor Burgin who argued that the representation of politics had to be preceded by research on the politics of representation, to use an overused formulation of the seventies one more time. But her heart was in something else: Within all households, forms of domestic warfare are continually in progress, and although we live this daily power struggle, it is censored, displaced, put off-bounds, transformed into icons of ritualised harmony within family photography…A political practice (with a small ‘p’) would seek to find ways to question this so that we could discover for ourselves the multiple discourses that so articulately invent and re-invent daily life for us (from the familiar television set to school reading books.) (Jo Spence,’What is a Political Photograph?’ Camerawork 29, Winter 1983/84)
Work
Jo defied conventional notions of work. She made no distinction between finding a useful photograph and taking one. She also wrote about photographs and talked about them, amongst other things. (In my opinion, her interviews were often stunning performances, a seriously underestimated dimension of her creative work that needs to be taken as seriously as the photographs and writings.) She also enjoyed collaborative projects that challenged a modern emphasis on individual achievement. In Three Perspectives, for instance, she pops up twice: firstly, as herself in the Feminist section; secondly as a member of The Hackney Flashers Collective in the Socialist section. In addition, she was an important catalyst, good at making proposals or setting an example that others could pick up on and develop in their own way. To be continued … Thanks to Terry Dennett (Jo Spence Archive, London) for supplying photographs from Beyond The Family Album. Thanks to Karen Quinn for permission to use the essay on Jo Spence, originally commissioned by Belfast Exposed.
