For the first time in France, the British photographer and activist Jo Spence is being celebrated through a solo exhibition organized by the associative gallery Treize, in collaboration with curator Georgia René-Worms.
Among her various research interests, author and curator Georgia René-Worms focuses on artistic practices related to illness, particularly hormone-dependent pathologies. It was in this context that she discovered Jo Spence’s work, who, between the 1980s and 1990s, while battling breast cancer and later leukemia, turned art into a therapeutic tool by developing the concept of “photo-therapy.”
Born in 1934 into a working-class family, Spence was largely self-taught. She began her photographic journey while working as a secretary in a development lab, before opening her own studio. There, she photographed families and observed how social representations, loaded with stereotypes, were constructed in front of the camera. Deconstructing these images became a lifelong mission. Deeply involved in activist photography, through collectives such as the Hackney Flashers, Camerawork, and the Photography Workshop, Spence’s work is as feminist as it is Marxist. She envisioned photography as a tool of political emancipation.
At 48, a breast cancer diagnosis confronted Spence with the harsh realities of Thatcher-era Britain’s healthcare system. As a woman, she also experienced infantilization at the hands of medical professionals. These encounters inspired a series of works exploring the (re)construction of a female body under medical scrutiny. In one striking image, she fragments her body into photographic details, asking in bold marker: “How do I begin to take responsibility for my body?” In another, a self-portrait of a breast slated for removal, she asserts with fierce pride: “Property of Jo Spence.”
To process this traumatic experience, Spence, alongside photographer Rosy Martin, developed the practice of photo-therapy. In front of the camera, she reenacted hospital scenes to reclaim her agency as a patient. Over time, this approach expanded beyond illness, allowing her to explore her personal history and identity as a woman constrained by gender and class archetypes. Family photographs and repressed memories became material for performance, staged with precision and care.
Spence meticulously documented this process in her scrapbooks forty in total blending photographs, press clippings, handwritten notes, letters, photocopies, and postcards. These intimate composites blur the boundaries between life and art. The Centre Pompidou acquired the collection in 2019, alongside twenty-one works. For the first time, Treize presents these scrapbooks alongside loans from the Richard Saltoun Gallery and the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive (Birkbeck University, London). Visitors will see not only prints but also cardboard-mounted images, typed and handwritten texts, press clippings, and numerous laminates. The exhibition remains faithful to Spence’s democratic and amateur approach to photography.
Her final series, The Final Project, created shortly before her death in 1992, confronts mortality with stark allegory. Stricken with leukemia, Spence’s images are haunted by death, yet they retain the incisive humor and political engagement that defined her career, a voice as compelling today as it was then.
Zoé Isle de Beauchaine
Jo Spence – Galerie Treize
Curated by Georgia René-Worms, in collaboration with Gallien Déjean and Emmanuel Guy
Open Thursday–Saturday, 2–7 PM, and by appointment
24 rue Moret, 75011 Paris
https://treize.site/
