The Featured Researcher for October 2024 was Lucy MacKenzie Howie, with a project titled, ‘Disability, Sexuality and the Politics of Representation: Photography in 1980s-1990s Britain’
HEIs: University of St. Andrews, Schools of Art History and Film Studies
Supervisors: Dr Catherine Spencer & Professor Glyn Davis
Lucy Howie presenting a conference paper at Glasgow Women’s Library
My PhD research investigates the intersecting but often overlooked histories of disability, sexuality, and the politics of representation in photography in 1980s-1990s Britain. I am interested in experimental forms of self-portraiture and staged studio photography by disabled and abled womxn, as well as feminist documentary practices and community activist work, which centre the body culturally inscribed as crip/queer/sick. My research highlights a cultural network of photographers, including Jo Spence, Rosy Martin, Samena Rana, Tessa Boffin, Franki Raffles, Sandra George, and Format Photography Agency, whose work sits in parallel to histories of the emerging social model of disability in the UK during this period.
My project brings disability and illness to the forefront of discussions on sexuality, race, gender, and class by using crip, queer, feminist and disability justice methodologies. Through this framework I address the challenges to documentary forms in photography theory and locate where these debates were transformed to new ends in disability rights activism and in response to Section 28.
What I am working on now
I am in my third year of my PhD and am currently undertaking a pre-doctoral fellowship at The Image Centre in Toronto. This research centre, part of Toronto Metropolitan University, which specialises in archives of photography and related media is home to the Jo Spence Memorial Archive. One of the chapters of my PhD considers Jo Spence and Rosy Martin’s ‘photo therapy’ practice that the pair co-developed following Spence’s breast cancer diagnosis in 1983. Combining co-counselling techniques with photography theory, photo therapy was part of Spence’s critique of Western orthodox medicine and traditional therapies, that centred sexuality, class, and gender in discussions on health. Enabling Spence and Martin to work through repressed experiences and emotions through radical self-imaging techniques, photo therapy deconstructed pervasive categories of photography like the family album and commercial studio portraiture that are inextricable from constructions of heteronormativity and ideals of the healthy body.
During my visit, I have had the opportunity to view Spence’s unpublished writing, diaries, correspondence, personal scrapbooks, and large-scale prints which relate to her research on the politics of cancer and her collaborative photo therapy practice. Spence’s exploration of illness and health coincided with debates in photography on sexuality and disability which appear in Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser’s UK touring exhibition Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs in 1991 and a series of exhibitions on disability commissioned by Camerawork in London between 1988 and 1992. Photo therapy straddled these concurrently developing discourses, but rarely has Spence’s practice been linked to the work of lesbian-feminist artists like Boffin and Fraser, or photographers and writers working within the disability rights movement, art therapy and health activism like David Hevey, Jessica Evans and Keith Kennedy. My research will trace these links through the archive to reveal new perspectives on Spence and Martin’s practice and elucidate a cultural network of lesser-known practices in and around this work.
During my time in Toronto, I have been able to immerse myself in the research culture at The Image Centre and the contemporary art scene in Toronto more broadly. By spending time with the centre’s research archivist Charlene Heath, I have gained an insight into her archival practice and have had productive conversations concerning our shared research interests. I have also had the opportunity to attend film screenings and artist-led programming at contemporary art venues across the city. The Toronto Biennial of Art and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) have both coincided with my visit where I have encountered new artistic practices and had fun exploring contemporary art in a new city!
