Jo Spence's camera therapy: personal therapeutic photography as a response to adversity

摘要

A complete formal history of the development of the field of 'therapeutic photography'1 in the UK has yet to be written, but this paper attempts to provide a review of at least some of the earliest aspects of it as they relate to the work of my late former partner and collaborator Jo Spence (1934-1992). I discuss the photo therapeutic methods Spence developed as part of her solo cancer survival program under the isolated, poverty stricken and difficult conditions she found herself in after her cancer diagnosis and treatment in Nottingham, England-methods developed under these far-from-ideal conditions of adversity, but ones which nevertheless have stood the test of time and can thus enrich today's professional practices from a number of perspectives. I discuss three early methods used by Spence: 'therapeutic staging', 'mirror therapy', and 'Scripting', and end with a brief note regarding the important method of 'collaborative photo therapy' which developed out of this early work. These, amongst other ideas not dealt with here, constitute some of the contributions Jo Spence made to the field of therapeutic photography throughout the world.