Jo Spence and Rosy Martin

Re-enactment 

 Phototherapy

As discussed in some of my previous points, all of us are continually exposed and bombarded with endless visual media- confronting or seducing our gaze, and encompassing the entirety of feelings;  grief, desire, loss, pain, excitement, horror, envy, joy, inadequacy and so on.  Rosy Martin elaborates that in the everyday world we deal with the parts of ourselves we can not face by putting them off on others and the media doesn't help by exposing continually the 'dominant cultural stories' leaving the rest unseen and untold (Martin 2001).

Starting in 1983, when Martin teamed up with the late Jo Spence, they began to tell their stories using their therapeutic relationship and a safe space to examine their experiences from multiple points of view, working class women, LGBT in Martins case, and Jo Spence facing cancer (Martin 2001).

Jo Spence had been experimenting with this venue of therapy since her diagnosis, mostly by necessity seeking her own psychotherapeutic help. Spence took note of her work, in highlighting the divide between autodidactic and certified professional therapy (Dennet 2001).

Bringing together both disciplines of both photography and therapy in radical new ways.  Re-enactment of the psychodrama not limited to the past, but including projections of the future as well.  Photography images created along the way.

In their phototherapy re-enactments, the everyday person can become the protagonist in a series filmic stills, and symbolically represent their own story.  A recreation of your own story, by consciously replacing your own person into your own experiences or roles, as well as the roles of those significant in your life.  The purpose to transform your inner psyche into new possibilities and to promote healing and self awareness (Martin 2001).

In the end, embodiment and ownership are fundamental to this process.  The goal is for those who participate to 'own' their own experiences and histories, including their own previous distresses, traumas and pain that may have been previously denied.  The photographs produces are then worked through in the counseling sessions.  Spence and Martin characterized their practice as an extension of the 'family album' and domestic photography (Martin 2001)

"This work is concerned with making psychic realities visible. It recognizes and uses the power of visual imagery in constructing, not revealing, the subject. In the performance of the selves the multiplicity and complexity of identities is made apparent." - Rosy Martin 2011






DENNETT, T., 2001. The wounded photographer: The genesis of Jo Spence's camera therapy. Afterimage, 29(3), pp. 26-27.

MARTIN, R., 2001. The performative body: Phototherapy and re-enactment. Afterimage, 29(3), pp. 17-20.