Jo Spence: Fairy Tales and Photography. Or, another look at Cinderella

RRB / The Hyman Collection, 2020, Softcover, 260 pages, 30 × 21.5 cm

In Fairytales and Photography. Or, Another Look at Cinderella we are invited to take a look at the ambitious and wayward 1982 BA dissertation of the cultural worker and photographer Jo Spence. She asks ‘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?’ Her chosen approach draws on her politics as a socialist feminist to inform her enquiry, untangling the interconnected gender and class oppressions in these historic tales.

This dissertation brings together subjects, both personal and political, that she grappled with throughout her life: social class, family histories, sexuality, representation of women and visual ideologies. Her work drew on her own lived experience of being a woman from a working-class background, her battles with cancer, mental health, education and her family history, but throughout she was always socially minded, with an eye on the structures of power that shape our lives.