Jo Spence: Fairy tales and Photography

About

'How do we take a story like Cinderella out of the archives, off the bookshelves, out of the retail stores and attempt to prise out its latent class content? Its political and social uses?'

Fairy tales and Photography, Jo Spence takes as its starting point her epic thesis Fairy tales and Photography. Or, Another Look at Cinderella (1982). Spence draws on her politics as a socialist feminist to inform her enquiry, untangling the gender and class oppressions interconnected in these historic tales. Entwined within this work are performative self-portraits juxtaposed with documentation of the Princess Diana media frenzy in the run up to the Royal Wedding, and the commercialization of love and marriage. Spence encourages women young and old to stop ‘waiting for their prince’, advocating instead the use of photography as a tool of personal and social transformation to break open the myths around which class and femininity are constructed.

The exhibition is curated by Patrizia Di Bello of the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive at Birkbeck College, University of London and James Hyman,and presents works from these two collections. It brings together major laminated panels on the theme of Cinderella (Hyman Collection) with archive photographs of Spence’s fairy tale themed 50th birthday party (Memorial Library Archive) to explore the ways in which the fantasy of the fairytale informs Spence’s critiques of class and gender.

The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of talks and two publications: a facsimile of Spence’s thesis and Class Slippers with essays by Francis Hatherley and Marina Warner (RRB Photobooks/Hyman Collection).