Cultural Sniping

Jo Spence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134962600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Jo Spence was one of Britain's pioneering photographers. This book is the first to reflect her unique contribution to photography and photographic theory.

IDENTITY, PHOTOGRAPHY, THERAPY

16.: NEW KNOTS, 1983

Unpublished poem written in 1983, referring to radical psychiatrist R.D.Laing’s work, Knots. Jo’s other short stories, poems and journals are yet to be published in an anthology. They are available in the Jo Spence Memorial Archive.

Questions of autobiography and authorship: recounting one’s own history and professional practice. Reworking those accounts The question of political commitment, differing psychic, social and economic formations within which we are formed and struggle: the denial of a need to belong, to belong to something greater than a set of conflicting ideas or incoherence; the denial of the role of ‘the family’ (our families) in our unresolved needs; the problem of love

The problem of not wanting a god

The problem of a dialogue with our families (social mobility, change of language, change of concepts in the now, but still a reliving in and through the past)

The denial of continuing conflict between family members (removing ourselves from the battlefield does not end the war) (Death does not end the war)

The problem of christmas

The question of being de-centred (that is having lost the idea of a coherent and autonomous self); how are we constructed across and between discourses (what about the bits in between?); making new spaces

Being allowed to speak, allowing ourselves to speak; learning to act

The problem of being too articulate (frightening to others): of encouraging others to speak and act; impatience at the slowness of it all. Still not being able to speak for ourselves as there is no coherent self; not wanting to speak for a movement; the problem of being theoretically correct

The problem of moving from over articulacy (honesty) back into silence. New anger. Decentring completed (is it ever?), fragmentation acknowledged; chaos of signification, crisis of representation; theory perfected (but always already out of date!)

The problem of silence; the playing out anew of unresolved and unconscious drives and desires onto new authority figures; pretending still to work collectively

THE PROBLEM OF NOT KNOWING WHAT THE PROBLEM IS

The problem of knowing there is a problem but that nobody else will acknowledge there is a problem

The problem of the past (family breakdowns); desire for the lost (in) coherent family; the problem of being out of control in the present (destruction and rebellion within various discourses)

The problem of waiting to receive permission to stop work and to rest. Who do I ask? Will she listen?

The problem that nobody understands the angry language used in the articulation of this preliminary request; the manifestation of a new crisis of representation. How do I now represent myself? How to speak when you are not spoken to? The problem of being polite

Who am I? How do I know that?

The problem of knowing when an internal request is really a request and not just a new power struggle, newly articulated

The use of illness as a way of solving intractable problems (just like I used it to bait mummy to get some attention, to avoid school, work and sex!)

The problem of feelings of guilt when we know we are manifesting such behaviour

The problem of love

The problem of final and total silence (no family, no coherent discourse, no language, no future)

Illness: the ultimate crisis of self-representation

Illness: how to represent this crisis? Who is listening?

Am I listening?

Re-remembering and re-reinventing the family

17.: THE POLITICS OF TRANSFORMATION: The female gaze

This paper was written in July 1986 as a possible contribution to Photography/Politics: Three but has never been published. Jo was in the process of revising it for publication as a small pamphlet in the Working Press series. Her revision notes suggest that she was also going to deal with unconsciousness raising, the role of women photography students, women in families, implications of race and class in the gaze of the child.

The eye is the most frequently used symbol in psychiatric art.’

(Edward Adamson, Art as Healing¹)

THE BACKGROUND

Many millions of words have now been written about the deconstruction of texts, or the unconscious processes of the interpellated viewers therein.² Because this has privileged only particular aspects of representation, it might perhaps be useful to try to shift our focus to another link in the chain of the ways meanings are produced within the signifying process: to the time of taking the photograph, and to the relationship between photographer and subject. In this way we can shift the emphasis from the process of viewing to the process of being photographed, the meanings generated there, and how they are negotiated. We need to investigate ways of showing how, as ‘split subjects’, we can and do inhabit different (and often contradictory) positions within different discourses at different times.

Similarly, any theoretical work that has attempted to demystify professional relationships has been done through a critique of the dominant discursive practices of the institutions within and surrounding photography, and of news, documentary, advertising and fine art practices; not forgetting of course the ways in which this is engaged with through the (dissonant) discursive practices of the avant-garde. News and advertising have proved remarkably adept at listening to criticism and changing, whilst subtly remaining exactly the same. In opposition, ‘community’ photography has endeavoured to evolve practices which move towards a democratization of the image, by involving the ‘community’ (the subjects) in the taking and using of photographs, film or video. Practices now exist which are both celebratory and validatory to the groups concerned, as well as work which has a valuable use for specific petitioning and campaigning purposes. Work has also evolved which deals with identity and socialization processes within discourses of employment, school, the family and the media, dealing also with peer group ‘style’ (I am thinking here, for example, of the work of the Cockpit Cultural Studies Department). Within these contexts, however, very little has been theorized about ‘amateur’ or ‘personal’ photographic practices. And whilst most ‘alternative’ practice does have a certain rallying call towards the idea of social identity, shared between members of groups, it takes very little account of unconscious thought processes, and has never set itself the task of dealing primarily with the ‘private’ domestic sphere of the family or the inequality of power within certain groups. This arena still remains therefore to be ‘opened up’ for theoretical discussion, and this paper is by way of an attempt to do this.

The most important place to try to map out visually power relationships both within, and in connection with, the family would seem to be the family album.³ However, there is ample evidence from sociologists to suggest that the visual images kept by most families in western culture stubbornly remain remarkably similar across the generations, locked into a narrow aesthetic range. The only major change which is apparent is that as tourism has expanded, so people travel more and take pictures wherever they go, and that processing houses now accept ‘domestic soft pornographic’ images for processing, for which there is a flourishing literature. So whilst electronic flash, miniature cameras, colour film and cheap processing might have widened the audience of users, the actual ‘content’ of most snapshots remains remarkably similar; so similar in fact that all bulk processing houses have been able to classify snapshots into a depressingly small range of categories which are used to trace films ‘lost’ somewhere between camera user and processing house. Thus we effectively remain locked into an unspoken agenda wherein only certain (imaginary) scenarios, e.g. ‘snow scene’, seem possible as subject matter for our cameras. And so we remain positioned within a series of structures (and structural absences)—within ‘private’ imagery, telling ourselves the same old fairy stories, with the encouragement of companies like Kodak. Clearly the family (however benignly it may represent itself to the ‘outside world’) is a battlefield of emotions and varying power struggles between men and women and between adults and children which is totally invisible within family archives, and I feel we should strive to find ways of ‘talking’ about this ‘dark side’ of our lives. Women especially, as the keepers of family memorabilia, could play a significantly different role as social historians if only they had a value for what has been termed ‘the archaeology of everyday life’.

In the past few years another sphere of photography has begun to be developed, most particularly in North America. This involves the use of photography in counselling and therapy.⁴ There is now a thriving community of therapists there, using photography in a variety of ways, who have regular conferences and symposiums, and publish the Photo Therapy Journal.⁵ In some respects their body of work can be seen to be in alignment, in this country, with that of the growing discipline of art therapy though this has not, as yet, given any significant attention to the uses of photography within training courses.

A recently published book Art as Healing⁶ is a useful guide to one aspect of art therapy and deals with the artworks of hospital and psychiatric patients. Much of the imagery contained therein deals with power and powerlessness. Such work is clearly operating within the twin discourses of art and ‘mental health’ (the book won the Book of the Year Award of the National Mental Health Association), so perhaps here we have a clue as to why British cultural journals have largely chosen to ignore this sphere of activity, in spite of ‘readers being present in their texts’ at every stage of the production of meaning processes. In the British photographic press, for example, there has been no interest in these developments or in their potential usefulness to us in debates about the importance of visual representation. I wonder why.

PHOTOTHERAPY—A HEALING ART?

All this is by way of scene setting, for I want now to move to a more specific account of my own experience of phototherapy. Being ‘taken ill’ in 1982 was possibly the most eye-opening experience of my life. In retrospect, I can now see that it took me on a journey from which I finally emerged with a ‘new’ practice in photography. During this journey I sought out and experienced many different kinds of therapy, as a way of trying to come to terms with the physical and mental crisis I was experiencing. Some of these therapies I used intermittently, some only once, some I have an ongoing commitment to within my own struggle for health….

I learnt a lot. In retrospect I came to realize that each of these frameworks or disciplines had different (though sometimes overlapping) systems of conceptualizing the psychic and the social, both theoretically and through visualization, dreamworks, visual fantasies, body and mind mapping and image making. It was a short step then to realize that as a photographer I could apply some of these techniques to photography.

Whilst I was a student in higher education we were offered a vast number of theoretical texts on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, related to ongoing debates within film theory, which we were then encouraged to integrate into our photographic practices. The work of women in the same field, for example Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, was never referred to (even though it was present in feminist studies). The work of Jung was ignored entirely. Some students took to this like ducks to water and produced excellent work. But because I was interested in the ways in which, in a patriarchal and class-based society, family relationships are contradictorily and unevenly lived out through the grind of fantasy and experience, I found it impossible to apply theory to existing ‘public’ or ‘mass-produced’ imagery in an endless round of deconstructions of texts—important though this may be. What was missing for me was any notion that psychoanalytic theory and its application to photography was integral to an understanding of my personal past (and that of millions like me) and to the images made and kept by families—a subject I have worked on continuously since 1975.⁷ No theory of ‘the subject’ can merely deal with the image-making process ‘out there’. Nor, if we are working with an analyst or therapist and being involved in the linguistic aspects of memory, should we exclude the reworking and reinvention of family photographs. Clearly if psychoanalysis is the ‘talking cure’ then phototherapy could conceivably be the ‘seeing cure’. It should become a priority to work to find ways to produce new photographs which can begin to address the silences, absences and disavowals that are continually being dealt with in therapy. After all, the ‘family photograph’ is a well-exploited genre within news and advertising photography, where psychologists and visualizers are employed to work on ways in which our unconscious processes can be engaged with. So why not re-appropriate, turn on its head and deconstruct their techniques back into the family itself?

THEORY AND ACTIVITY?

It was only in the safety of the activity of therapy, crying, screaming, shouting, sweating, trembling, dredging up and engaging with repressed feelings, acting out and being acted upon in psychodramas, touching and being touched, moving and breathing differently, playing trust games, in solo and group work, that I began to get in touch with all my senses, and make the connections as to how photography and some forms of such therapies could come together; and how, at last, I could begin to apply my hard-won knowledge from higher education in a different way….

‘YOU DISPLAY… ME WATCH’

Drawing upon my experience of working jointly with Rosy Martin, I began to work as photographer/therapist with two different men, both of whom were in therapy and working on aspects of their masculinity. In this work I have now begun to experience what perhaps could be meant by the positive connotations of the term ‘the female gaze’. In the safety of a phototherapy session based on mutual trust, with no value judgements, no interruptions, no interpretations of what is going on, it began to seem possible that whilst I was in the position of the therapist (and therefore possibly in a surrogate ‘mother’ position), my ‘sitters’ could begin to give visual expression to how they felt about aspects of their own sexuality: either to live out that which they felt had been repressed, or to try to broaden their own definition of a range of visible sexualities. This immediately foregrounded for me these two men’s totally different visual approaches to their sexuality. One, working within a Jungian framework, presented himself in each session in a symbolic fashion (what in psychotherapeutic terms is called the ‘transpersonal’). In giving expression to deeply felt longings and anxieties about the fixity of his own masculine construction, he felt it would be productive to try to work through how it felt to become female (the Jungian concept of the bringing together of the ...