Graz. »Beyond the Perfect Image« opens up a Beyond that goes further than references to such diverse photographic standards as aesthetic perfection, normalising naturalism or a documentary approach suggesting control and immediate enlightenment. The exhibition displayed with this title explodes left, right and centre into political theories of representation and subjectivity and bursts out of the life of an activist. The energetic practical and theoretical added-value is created by the consistently unconventional thought and action of the photographic cultural and social worker Jo Spence (London 1934–1992).
Jo Spence, who trained as a portrait photographer and even ran her own studio at one time, realised at the age of forty that she could not achieve anything biographically or socially meaningful with her portrait photography. That is why she made a theoretical and political-cum-practical examination of photography the centre of her life. Or, to put it the other way round: she uses photography to look at the political aspects of her biography and her social environment.
In this context photography is an instrument, not a goal or the centre of her work. That is because a long shot in a photographic cannot summarise, give an overview or symbolise the social rules that Spence wishes to explore. Just like the theoretical and activist aspects, the visual elements that she both reconstructs and utilises in her photographic social research remain aspects of a process of interrogation continued right to the end of her life. This extends beyond any attempt at documentation. The strength of the exhibition in Camera Austria is that it demonstratively allows this, not striving for a holistic oeuvre or limiting itself to the photographic or aesthetic, and in the process casts a critical light on the rest of the Graz Kunsthaus.
The starting point for Spence’s theoretical interrogations lies in a confrontation with 1930s worker photography and in criticism of naturalistic/victimising, reformist and distanced forms of the documentary that adopt a critical stance towards ideology. In formulating this criticism – and don’t forget this was in the heyday of (post-) structuralist theorising and criticism of the subject – she was not advocating infinitely regressing structures of referents, signifiers and other semiotic games. Spence articulated her criticism in the name of a documentary approach that can make social rules and structures conscious, tangible and changeable, even if these (as she, echoing Brecht, is aware) have long slithered into the category of the functional and can scarcely be depicted.
Spence’s practical journey began in the »Photography Workshop« (1974). Photo workshops for children were on offer here, outside the framework of conventional educational institutions, the »Camerawork« magazine was launched and theories on visual culture produced, discussed and published1. The »Photography Workshop« also established photo archives, produced and organised distribution of documentary collages (e.g. on women’s work in the London working and middle class district of Hackney), as well as organising exhibitions, albeit more in the trade union setting than in the gallery context.
The exhibition in Graz, which was shown previously in MACBA in Barcelona,2 opens with »Beyond the Family Album« (1979). Here, as a logical continuation of her research on worker photography, Spence explores and deconstructs the function and aesthetics of amateur photography – drawing on the concrete example of her own family album. The work comprises a cycle of photo-text collages made up of family photos, her later photographic re-stagings of these, real and unrealised versions of her own biography in written form, along with theoretical considerations on the exposition and imposition of social rules in family photo albums. Spence demonstrates in these collages what an outstanding opportunity family albums offer with a view – through the excluded topics of illness, unemployment, sex, relationship crises etc. – to understanding and changing concealed subjectivization rules in the milieu of the lower middle class.
In subsequent works (arranged chronologically in the exhibition too) collage is detached from staging techniques. The »Remodelling Photo History« cycle (1982, together with Terry Dennett) is a humorous visual theory about the rules of classical photographic genres. In sections entitled »Industrialization, »Colonization«, »Victimization«, »Realization« and »Revisualization«, the works explore the codes of industrial photography, ethnological photography, documentary, advertising and erotic photography. These works are the staging ground for brutally precise jokes, which move far beyond simple reconstruction and display of photographic rules and thus also beyond the rules of reality. For example in »Colonization« when Spence stands outside the front door of a shabby working-class house, naked from the waist up, adorned with a huge necklace and holding a broom in her hand, it is not just about revealing clichés about natives with primitive tools posed in front of something like a hut. The switch in skin colour is more than a sarcastic joke about us as colonisers. It is no simple tit-for-tat response aimed at colonial masters if attributes of natives are not simply draped about a white slave trader here, but instead a white woman is fitted out with central insignia of the English lower classes. The staging instead triggers awkward questions and tensions. A problematic approach of equating the colonised and the exploited in the so-called mother country is hinted at, whilst at the same time rejected.
A further group of works takes Spence’s cancer as its topic. In this context a distinction must be drawn between a cycle of photographs in which Spence consciously revolts against the prohibitions on and conventions of representation in the hospital world, and a series of other works. These on the one hand comprise almost diary-style personal reflections on her changed life with alternative medicine, and on the other hand a series of images developed in the context of the phototherapy she developed with Rosy Martin. The latter echo the techniques of »Family Album«, with photographic re-staging of early photographic and other images, particularly those relating to shame.
It seems striking that Spence’s work does not present a historical position of photography – as people like to assert, when not (any longer) quite sure of a work’s relevance – but instead a still unparalleled visual and theoretical practice. The extent and impertinence with which Spence disregards certain theoretical discourses (knowingly, not out of ignorance) is astonishing, as is the way in which she at the same time not only develops other theoretical discourses – think, for example of Foucault’s and Bourdieu’s theory of subjectivisation through unconscious collective rules – but also simultaneously renders these discourses accessible and moves them forward. She does this not by taking leave of the theorized subjects, but instead by taking them and their stories as her starting point and directly exploring social rules so that alternatives unfold at the same time. One could refer here to local politics with visual structures. Spence’s practices are in fact so specific that they are impossible to emulate, unless one begins to ask questions just as insistently as Spence did in one’s own –and thus in a very different – environment. And indeed with such minimal means that it makes your head spin.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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