About the artwork 

This limited edition photographic print shows a series of contact sheets made by collaborators Jo Spence & Terry Dennett. A number of the images were featured in Spence’s seminal work Beyond The Family Album, 1979 and included the following text alongside the images:

"Allowing myself to concentrate on the playing out of various images for the camera gave me an immense amount of information about myself. Apart from the fun we had from this, I began to conceive of myself as a set of signals or signs, all of which ‘meant’ something to the viewer (including myself), which I could begin to control more by emphasizing or de-emphasizing as I wished. When these signs (of me) had been transferred into photographs the ‘meanings’ changed depending on the context in which they were used."

This edition has been generously produced and donated by The Jo Spence Memorial Archive and Richard Saltoun, London.

About the artist

Jo Spence (b. 1934–d. 1992) emerged as a key figure in the mid-1970s from the British photographic left, crucial in debates on photography and the critique of representation. Her work engaged with a range of photographic genres, from documentary to photo therapy, and responded to the prioritisation from the late 1970s onwards of lens-based media in art-critical discourse.