Jo Spence: The Unknown Recordings opens a rare listening archive

By Olivia Hart

Jo Spence: The Unknown Recordings runs to 256 pages, with 30 colour illustrations and eight black-and-white images. Museums etc publishes it on 1 January at £35 in paperback and £25 as an e-book. Its core is a verbatim transcript of Spence’s 1991 British Library oral-history interview, extending to more than 100 pages.

Jo Spence (1934–92) was a London-born, London-based British photographer, writer, class and health activist, and educator. She challenged assumptions about what photography could be by using her own image to unsettle accepted ideas about female beauty, health, identity and societal expectations. The new volume treats that practice as something heard as much as seen: an intimate self-portrait built from recordings rather than a conventional picture-led biography.

Its modest image count leaves room for Spence’s voice, which has the useful inconvenience of being specific. Spence’s achievements centred on the small home and studio on Islington’s Upper Street, which she shared with her partner and collaborator Terry Dennett (1938–2018).

That domestic base connected her writing, teaching, self-photography and political work. The material shows how closely those activities converged, rather than sorting them into neat categories.

Published 40 years after Spence’s disarmingly frank autobiography, Putting Myself in the Picture (1986), the book makes a case for the spoken archive. For all its additions, the volume does not surpass that autobiography as a personal statement; its distinct achievement is to place transcripts of historic recordings around it. It assembles fragments, testimony and documents, then leaves the connections for the reader.

What do the recordings recover?

Spence’s interview for the British Library’s Oral History of British Photography provides the anchor. The transcript covers childhood, early working life, photography, collaboration, politics, breast cancer and leukaemia. Few fragments or diversions interrupt the exchange, so the reader almost hears a real conversation rather than a polished institutional summary. That quality makes the interview both immediate and difficult to contain.

Spence shares personal ideas and experiences with unusual generosity, including her experience of chronic illness and her attempts to regain power over her body and identity. Her friendship with artist Rosy Martin and their development of phototherapy, a psychological therapy centred on photography, supplies some of the rawest material. The method also puts the image at the centre of an encounter between people, not merely making pictures of them.

How does illness shape the archive?

A shorter recording from 1982, made after Spence’s breast-cancer diagnosis, offers the least comfortable listening. Across two days, Spence records her own thoughts; distress, tears and self-analysis fill the tape as she works through the stressors in her life.

It is neither testimony neatly prepared for others nor evidence of composure. It is a private mind trying to become legible to itself.

Spence often blurred the line between private and public, and the recording entered her archive. Publication consequently creates the slight charge of eavesdropping. In one poignant passage, Dennett shouts words of support, apparently from another room. The interruption adds human scale without tidying away the anguish, which is probably why the tape remains more bracing than the book’s other interviews.

What did Spence make political?

Visual activist and educator Andrew Dewdney and curator Shirley Read interviewed Spence at the Cockpit Arts Workshop in London in 1989. Their conversation gives a sharper political edge to her account than the British Library session does. It moves among the Photography Workshop, Hackney Flashers, Half Moon Photography Workshop and Camerawork magazine, joining her photographic ideas to a wider political practice.

Taken together, those projects coalesced around what the book identifies as Spence’s focus on “people’s right to speak and be seen”. The phrase does more than summarise her politics; it explains why she treated photography as a public practice. She extended the possibilities of photography towards the unspeakable and the unphotographable. The conversation supplies an institutional history alongside the personal archive.

What sits in the appendices?

Four appendices function as a postscript to Spence’s voice, and they do useful work beyond simple chronology:

• Her dismissal from Half Moon over ideological differences.
• Recently discovered images from Spence’s 1994 retrospective.
• Photographs, thoughts and exchanges with artist Pru Clements.
• Spence’s curriculum vitae from March 1987.

The dismissal records a political rupture within the workshop culture around Spence. The retrospective images extend the visual record beyond the book’s sparse illustration. Pru Clements material shifts attention towards an artistic exchange. The March 1987 CV provides a dated snapshot of Spence’s work. Together, the four items prevent her voice from becoming a sealed retrospective performance.

Dennett’s reworked introduction to Putting Myself in the Picture provides the volume’s clearest statement of method. He makes the position plain: Spence worked “under difficult circumstances” while remaining focused on empowering others. The wording is appropriately plain. It locates her achievement in the effort to make photography serve other people’s self-expression.

The Unknown Recordings is correspondingly strongest as a textual object. With fewer than 40 illustrations across 256 pages, it cannot compete with a densely illustrated survey of Spence’s pictures, nor does it try. It offers something less tidy: a voice assembled from an oral-history session, a two-day self-recording, a political interview and four documentary postscripts. The result adds meaningful texture to Spence’s life and legacy without pretending to contain them.

Spence did not belong to the cultural elite, but she found a way to tell her own story and hoped it would become a model for others. This volume makes that method available in unusually direct form and points towards further visual and textual material surrounding her life.

For museums and libraries, the next task is equally plain: keep opening the surrounding visual and textual archive rather than treating this publication as a final account. The book ends by doing what Spence did: pointing elsewhere.