Always committed to questioning the ideologies behind photographic images, Jo Spence is best known for introducing the concept of phototherapy. Diagnosed with breast cancer, she used photography to reflect her own sick body.
In this emblematic photograph, which is also part of major international collections such as MoMA and Tate Modern, the artist depicts herself as a worker reading Sigmund Freud’s On Sexuality, looking hilariously perplexed. Social worker Florence Rush and former director of the Freud Archives Jeffrey Masson were the first to denounce the “Freudian dissimulation”, which argued that by exchanging female veracity for female fantasy, Freud removed responsibility for sexual abuse from male aggressors and placed it on women and their imagination. Beyond Spence’s artistic and political intentions, this image becomes a visual metaphor for the feminist response to the “Freudian cover-up”.
This work was also presented at MBAL during the exhibition Le plaisir du texte (2023).
Gelatin silver print, inv. 2023-0011
