So right to be written off the work of just spent since photography theory.
Something else happened. Old Don.
In 1988, Photograph, part of a collaboration with David Roberts, just spent a kid on a bench completely covered with a shroud like sheet.
Apart from a feet were dangling from a right toe tag, identifies it by name.
You can't really quite see it like I cut it in the PowerPoint, but not when I Shary on Sudan.
And something is going on perhaps. Can people carry on?
Are people still seeing. No, we can't see your PowerPoint, is it.
No. There's something wrong here. Yeah. Maybe something wrong. The the somebody else's queen is taking over.
All right. Sorry, Patricia.
I just ask for everybody to really turn off a video camera and we'll ask to be able to see your pamphlet properly.
OK. Thank you. OK. He's gone again. Every time a.
Above the head, as if labelling the corpse with a warning, the sheet of paper attached to the walls spells out in felt tip.
Right. Will be written off. And writing. She did. Spence, published in 1976, The Politics of Photography in the first issue of camerawork.
The magazine shed contributed to setting up with the Community Resource Halfmoon Photography Workshop in 1975.
And I think this might have been a first published piece. The last two books she worked on came out in 1995.
Three years after her death, Cultural Sniping The Art of Transgression is a collection of 26 essays spanning a career edited by Jones Joe Standardly.
And What Can a Woman Do with a camera? Photography for Women is a compilation of essays,
practical instructions and other resources gathered by Spens and Joan Salamone to show
different ways to use photography and be engaged with the family album back and forth,
from the personal to the political to encourage the unravelling of the past.
To understand the present and change to future.
In between, Spence published a monograph Putting Myself in the picture, a political, personal and photographic autobiography in 1986.
So we when we tried day sum, it was a working fine and now it's some sticking a bit anyway.
So she also published many articles in a variety of photography journals, camera, work, screen screen, creative camera 10 eight.
This is going this stinking block where she published an article about the work of John Hartfield de Smollett,
photocopies use less and more conservative and long established British Journal of Photography, where she took part in a documentary forum.
A piece is featured in feminist magazines such as Sparerib Feminist Thought News into
women artists like Libraries Journal Counterculture Weekly such as City Limits,
as well as David said, ducation social work arts magazines also edited and contributed to several volumes of the photography.
A really interesting pocket guide from 1977, she wrote with Richard Greenhill and Nike Murray.
We heard from her earlier. Came Photography Politics one in 1970, Photography Workshop Annual.
She edited with Terry Dennet, David Evans and Suvir Goal Photography Politics Stookey Martin 1986, edited with Patricia Holland and Simon Watney.
And family snaps the meaning of domestic photography. Again with Patricia Holland in 1991.
Collaboration was central to all the working practises, and she co-wrote with a number of other people, including Rosie Martin and John Taylor.
Finally, the legendary dissertation on fairy tales and photography she wrote to the Polytechnic of Central London in 1982.
It's coming up soon is in effect, C.M.A. Edition, partly thanks to an initiative by James Hyman.
Writing also features heavily in a visual work in the image.
And you can see that here also she's got this right to be written off, written sort of dead behind the head.
In scrap books and diaries, there are about 40 surviving of these kinds of scrapbooks,
albums that she made on this sort, a cheap as some sort of bound blank paper.
That money could buy at the time. And as extended captions, we didn't composite panels.
The texts are sometimes all at once personal narratives related to the images, critiques of dominant visual and photographic regimes.
And a way to make legible the processes, conscious and unconscious, personal and political,
practical and technical, involved in the making of the work itself.
And I love how one of the last panels in this exhibition is actually a collection of all Dean voices
and photographic laboratories and mounting shops that she used to actually make the exhibition.
This critical set for a CBT, both physical and verbal, constantly repeated and reconfigured in order to be shared with their audiences,
was crucial to a way of working as a photographer, educator, writer and cultural sniper.
Just Pense was committed to investigating, unmasking and changing the politics of representation.
Who has the power to represent who? How, why and to what effects?
Most often in collaborative projects and informal support groups.
She was also very concerned with our own work to be represented, and writing was central to the efforts to control deaths.
As she wrote here in the piece with Derek Dan 18, 1983 quote,
It is surely contradictory that very little is actually shown about most groups who are involved.
Somebody is actually known about most groups who are involved in the politics of representation.
Little don't they themselves raise fundamental questions about representation.
The question of how they represent themselves is almost always ignored.
In her conditions, lesser of 1992, a set of notes to Dennet spelling out what she wants to happen to a quote,
in case my illness gets worse and I drop dead, unquote.
She's still preoccupied with this issue. She writes in the condition number three, quote, You must always have the final say.
How my work is presented. And that goes for the captions and the texts as well.
If people disagree, we drove to work. I don't want you to [INAUDIBLE] about arguing with middle class families stuck a day.
Makes me think they know more about my work than you do. End of quote.
A multiplicity of representations, our weather is one of the important means through which the reputation of artists,
photographers or writers is established and maintained.
Like the work of social reproduction, cooking food, cleaning house, looking after children,
the construction of reputation is never a joke done, but needs to be attended to.
Over and over again, the higher the number of people invested in looking after someone's reputation, the more effective digital becomes.
As an artist, reputation rises.
So does that of the people who write about them in the process of documenting each other's subjectivity, not unlike that of portraiture itself.
Photographers become famous by portraying famous people and being portrayed it portrayed by famous photographers helps people become famous.
Think of Princess Diana and Mario Testino. Spence herself guarded a huge archive of the Beashel construction of the Charles and Diana fairy tale
as part of their ongoing Cinderella project about class identity and social mobility for women.
Feminist art historians might have critiqued and rejected notions of the canon when writing about women artists.
But the risk here is that the reputation of the practises that are marginalised by the canon ends up languishing and attended and forgotten.
While that of the white male middle class artists or theorist's forges ahead unabashed.
At the end of a life, while working on the final project,
Spence had become interested in the power of representations in mythologies of the afterlife.
As Dennett explained, quote, If all representations were lost, then writing or speaking, the deceased name will still ensure survival to remember.
And honour was to be activate. End of quote.
So my paper today is offered as a way of attending to the reputation of Spens to speak in name reactivated work and contribute to a role.
Let us now praise famous women and our mothers that begat us.
To paraphrase the full biblical quote, Spences is indeed one of the bodies of my work.
Talking with her contributed to hatching my interest in being a historian rather than a photographer.
She was my external examiner or my photography degree, LC.
Yes, it was then called and it was her insight into the importance of the family album in
the circulation of photographic culture as ideology visualised and made personal.
That eventually led me to APHC and writing a book on Victorian women's albums.
And there aren't many 19th century photography books that Sacto spense.
As an educator of self and others spend so researching and writing,
Historicist crucial but was ambivalent about the photographic theory establishing itself at the time because of
how it ended up creating new realities rather than being used as the transformative to looking through CBT.
It could be. According to Dennet, Spence had been very happy to get into the Polytechnic of Central London as a much more student to study.
We'd fixed a bugging on what was one of the first degrees in photography,
what the the in this theory was placed at the centre of the curriculum, in particular semiotics and psychoanalysis.
Spence, however,
soon became critical of the difference between the critical theory she was being taught and the not so critical practises of the place.
In alternative, she started working with other women on the course as the poli snappers to share skills in a non-hierarchical way.
And, quote, combat intellectual terrorism through John discussion.
End of quote. As they wrote in their degrees show.
When Spence invited Bergin to contribute an article for camera work, she made him rewrite it to make it more accessible.
As she explained elsewhere, quote, Much of the theory of photography now will offer appears to be impenetrable.
And the idea that theory, the idea that theory is very good for you has become a truism.
However, we cannot live without theory,
and it is important for all of us to continue to try to engage with the analysis and theorise Asian of photography and to ask for
answers to the question why and how radical theory can be liberating both for us as individuals and in terms of group identity.
The writing is always defiantly accessible, even if at times she thought she might have been right, that this meant that her work was undervalued.
Quote, My work has being constantly ignored, but boasting of feminist orthodoxy and most of the structuralist avant garde is too popular.
End of quote, representing itself.
What if it was not just a way to take control of a narrative as a practitioner and bypass hostile or uninterested critiques?
A key methodology in theatre ization of photography as a tool of change and transformation, both personal and political and decent.
The next slide double page spreads from Spare Rade and depos.
Jay Pegg's from Tempe Dennett's archive digital archive.
Throughout her life, Spence insisted on working independently from formal structures of institutional support, such as university park posts,
arts funding, body or commercial galleries, even if at times she and the people she worked with dipped into them strategically.
This enabled Spence to reject specialised language, and Frederika Demick writes it sort any Frida.
Writing from academic evaluations based on the regionality, the lineage of sources and the logic of thesis building,
as Jessica Evans points out in her work on Spens to respond instead to the need to instil and support political commitment in her reader.
Whether writing about John Hartfield, the representation of women in work during the Second World War.
This is from Photography Politics one. Our own education and career in photography to Esther she's interested in is a history from below.
Inspired by and consonant with working class self-help, education and community literalist projects.
As a result, a rich body of work is one that does not develop neatly from one theme to another.
One argument to the next, but continuously spirals and falls back onto itself,
developing repeating themes in changing patterns for different contexts.
So here, I'm going to focus on Spence theorise ation of the photo album.
Beyond the family album, Private Images, Public Conventions,
which featured in the 1979 exhibition Three Perspectives on Photography at the Hayward Gallery,
London represented a turning point in how she stole a career.
Having worked in photography for 27 years as an advertising news and portrait photographer and then community,
an alternative documentary projects, she had decided to take a break from taking photographs to make you think it made a living.
She got a job as a secretary instead to concentrate on, quote, the question of who represents who in our society, how they do it and for what purpose.
This was urgent because, quote, photography is the most commonly used method of visual representation.
And it is also the most accessible. As a socialist and a feminist, it had become untenable for her to carry on selling to other people fictions.
She had made about them instead of acquiescing with the uses of photography as, quote, part of a system which means a method of representing,
classifying and thereby evaluating people through types of visual and verbal representation.
End of quote. She wanted to reflect on how to create, quote,
an oppositional practise to identify these categories and exposed him as not being neutral, but ideological.
End of quote. So she office as an example, motherhood.
Reconfigured US childcare in the exhibition. Who's holding the baby by the hand he flashes one of the groups she worked with,
which was exhibited in another section of three perspectives on photography.
And beyond the Family album, she also interrogates Wollman family work class,
Leisa, beauty and photography itself a socially and historically constructed.
I don't know if some have claimed she was the first to exhibit domestic photographs in a gallery setting.
I know other women in Europe and South America working with similar materials in the 1970s.
But she was one of the first to offer a methodology for a sustained analysis of
the family album beyond histories of Kodak or biographies of powerful individuals.
She considered albums as an important site for the construction and maintenance, not only a photographic culture, the various conventions,
techniques, institutions which constitute and control photography, but was so dominant and oppressive ideologies.
This reflection of the relationship between herself, US photographer and herself, US image became the structure for the book,
putting myself in the picture which came out with the exhibition, just Ben's review of work.
Nineteen fifty two. Nineteen eighty five.
Rather than a catalogue of retrospective exhibition of a retrospective exhibition pinpointing and glorifying moments in their career.
The book looks as an alternative album of it classed and agented identity as a photographer,
beginning with reflections on a child to a working class family in wartime and post-war London.
The limited range of health care, education and work opportunities available to her as a young working class woman,
how she managed to become a photographer,
but also the limits of narratives on offer for her to construct around identities and the fight to create new ones for herself.
This was to paraphrase the Allan Sekula quoting disposal, which might be, I don't know, might be an early version of the exhibition.
As you can see, his name is actually misspelled. He's just one L.
So this was an exploration of how she could invent her life out of the limited range of possibilities and how her life was invented for her.
But by those in power. But it is also an invitation for the viewer to ask the same questions.
Adopt them selves. The work is shared not as art of self-expression, but as a case study,
a kind of here's one we prepared earlier to demonstrate how and why we should all
deconstruct our own images to become conscious of the forces that have shaped us.
Throughout the writings, Spirit stresses the importance of developing a historic consciousness of Dunbabin in the past.
To understand the present and change the future. These became my own questions in researching Victorian women's albums.
I was interested in the traces these women had deposited in photographic culture at a time when photographic culture was it since infancy.
It had invented a life up to the limited range of possibility. And now their lives were invented for them by those in power,
but was also interested in how and why that used photography to represent fictions about their own lives.
Three and three other related insights from Spences terrorisation of the photo album that also became crucial for my research.
The first is that family of personal items might concentrate on moments and events as this, and this, too, does private, but they are not.
They also image social, economic and stoeckle forces, including ideology's, the photography, self singing sway.
They become interesting, not in spite of their repetitiveness, but because of it and readable beyond an interest in particular individuals.
The second is around the standing of the power dynamics involved at every stage of the photographic process.
Between the photographer, the people being photographed and what is possible,
according to current technologies and notions of what is good or worthwhile to photograph.
And then the power dynamics that determine who is in control of selecting captioning and circulating photographs
on the pages of magazines or on the pages of albums where parents create narratives that can later be contested,
critiqued and read against the grain by rebellious daughters.
Through her critique of her experience as a photographer,
as the subject of photographs and then as a user of photographs made by Adi's Spencer realised long before the SLA.
That the photographic event is not circumscribed by the encounter between photographer equipment and subject matter
starts long before then and continues with each subsequent he uses and view was of the photographs in this process.
Moreover, Pylorus never completed with one or the other, but always the result of negotiations.
This means that even in the most stereotypical looking album, the power is never completely with photographic manufacturers,
photographers or dominant ideologies represented or the album collectors.
And that is simply passive consumers of photography. The third productive aspect, suspense is the utilisation of the photo album.
I want to highlight here comes from reflections on what's not represented in them.
Work in this unhappiness. Moments of failure.
Conflictual struggle. She understood how these are unrepresented, all in existing photographic languages with snapshots, studio portraits,
documentary photographs or even art phototherapy developed partly as a language to be able to represent what previous John Ross could not.
But this work also highlights the albums represent not the reality of life, but its aspirations.
There are sites with notions of what is worth recording and celebrating becomes
personalised and visualised as moments of individual or familial achievement.
Take the cliché of wearing Sunday best clothing, portraits and snapshots and snapshots remarked upon and beyond the family album.
And a theme in Spencer, Spens and Martin's phototherapy work.
As Maria Antonietta, much hockey wrote about workers in Naples in the 1960s, quote,
Sunday is the day in which everyone wants to forget that there is any need to work and to dress as if no one is forced for a living.
Clothes in this context, give to illusions of power.
End of quote. And this is from leftist to Alton's air. The fact that Spencer's parents family albums showed no traces of their working class identity.
But only moments where they conformed to middle class expectations.
Holliday's Happy Children and Mudder's moments of leisure and smart clothes and gave, quote,
no indication at all of the wider social, economic and political histories of our disgusting class, divided society.
End of quote. It's not just about the compulsion to conform to middle class standards,
but also adopt deep desire to fix fleeting instances of respite from everyday struggles and chores.
Working class families want to show themselves as if they were not forced to work for a
living in situations in which they can indulge the illusion of power over their own lives.
So not at work, not hale, not showing any of the efforts that go into preparing for special family occasions.
What the conflict and unhappiness that often circulate around them.
The album is where the illusion of happy moments is consolidated and the editing used to construct life as Liebert successfully.
To conclude, I want to go back briefly to the issue of women and work in spences photography and writing,
partly to complicate the notion that she moved away from a commitment to this theme when she moved from
documentary to phototherapy already with the Hatemi flashes that were using a variety of visual strategies,
documentary and non. The highlight, for example, women's double or even triple shift as work is Mondays and wipes.
As we have seen, she'll she also researched the theme historically.
Looking at represent representations of women workers during the Second World War,
when some of the work of social reproduction was professionalised in what, workplace canteens and nurseries?
Did I say it was to quote Broden? The question of decoding images of women to take into account not just the symbolic sexual lack,
but also the exploitation of women's labour under capitalism?
End of quote.
This research survivor was just as relevant to a working phototherapy coming to terms, for example, with a complex feelings for her mother.
The process of imagining itself has us not that going to work better realise to have realised how well it's exploiting her.
This might have also offered us some moments of pleasure in small acts of freedom.
Smoking,
as she was not allowed to do by a husband or reading a magazine during a break was once a term that when no statutory breaks from housekeeping.
This helped turn the anger that she had felt towards her mother, for example, for abandoning her to go to work, for letting it.
When she went, Spence was evacuated as part of the programme to allow women to go work in the factories.
So this helped to turn the anguish it felt towards a mother, into a feminist anger that could be challenged towards change.
Through a process it shared visually with other women. The workload itself, then, was not a retreat from exploring issues of class and work.
But a test case to demonstrate the viability of the collective project.
That was part Marxist class consciousness, part graduation.
Knowing yourself as a product of a historical process, quote, which is deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory.
And this is Gramme she which she cited by Dennet and Span's. And part second wave feminist consciousness raising as the recession of photography
and a thinking theoretical about photography and never an end in themselves,
but hard to enable others to reflect on their own struggles.
They not only created a desire for change, but also propose blueprints for action.
Thank you.