Phototherapy is … potentially life changing.

Introduction

Rosy Martin is a British artist and activist who, in collaboration with fellow artist Jo Spence, developed a form of psychological therapy centred on photography. Phototherapy, as we will be discussing it here, is the use of photographic imagery to therapeutic ends. It is a broad term, not limited to any one particular psychological discipline. The images may be found (in the family album, in the mass media…) or created during the performing or acting out of personally significant memories, ideas, or feelings. This latter form is called re-enactment phototherapy and it is this that was first developed by Rosy Martin and Jo Spence in the 1980s.

The genesis of re-enactment phototherapy lay in a form of non-directive peer-to-peer counselling called co-counselling, in which two people take it in turns to be the counsellor. In that role, their task is to listen to and support the other person as they work through their issues in a largely self-directed way. For this the counsellor must give their full attention to the other person without judgment. Time is shared equally, and each person experiences both roles. The essence of this form of counselling lies in the trust and mutual support established within the therapeutic space, something that became an essential part of re-enactment phototherapy.

Following the premature death of Jo Spence, Rosy Martin continued to develop the methodology of phototherapy. Reaching outwards, she expanded the process to include more formalised counsellor–client relationships and group workshopping sessions. Meanwhile, looking inwards, she applied what she had learned to her own artmaking. Working alone or in collaboration with others, she addressed issues of grieving and aging in imagery that is by turns poignantly understated, playfully contrary, and fiercely critical.

But we begin our conversation at the beginning, when Rosy met Jo and the notion of re-enactment phototherapy first began to form in the enabling spirit of trust and mutuality…

Alasdair Foster

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Interview

How did your collaboration with Jo Spence begin?

We were attending a co-counselling course when we had an idea that was to change our lives. Jo was working on how she was perceived by others: as a student, as a middle-aged woman, as someone with breast cancer, as a photographer. I was working on how, as a lesbian, I felt I was constrained to wear a uniform, which was something I had resisted all my life. For me, clothes were fun, part of my self-expression. I designed and made most of my outfits or collected them for the pleasures of dressing-up.

Co-counselling together, we asked ourselves what it would be like to be who we want to be instead of trying to meet other people’s expectations. I had cupboards full of dressing-up clothes, Jo had a camera. So, the next time we met, we tried on a variety of roles within the trust and safety of the co-counselling relationship we had established during the preceding year. The process brought to the surface deep conflicting emotions, which we worked through within the frame of our established therapeutic relationship, transforming them both visually and psychologically.

Quickly, very quickly, we realised that we had discovered a powerful way of working. Through experimentation and risk-taking, facilitated by the permission we gave each other as co-counsellors, and the safe space established in our therapeutic exchange, we evolved ‘re-enactment phototherapy’.

That process also has an important socio-political dimension…

As we began to tell and make visible our own stories, from our own points of view, we realised that this is an exploration of psychic reality, a form of ‘unconsciousness raising’. Working with our personal histories – our location in time, place, and culture – we foregrounded the social construction of identities within the drama of the everyday. By mapping out class pain and shame, how we both learnt from and rejected our mothers’ gender role models, the history of our sexualities, and our relationship to the discourses of medicine, education, law, and the media, we made visible links between the personal, the social, and the political. In doing so, we put the power back into domestic photography.

And this is very much a collaborative process?

Yes. And to indicate this, we always credited the works we made with both our names.

One key aspect of this practice is the exchange of power relations. Traditionally, power was held by the photographer but here it is the sitter who directs and the photographer who supports them. The phototherapist acts as witness, advocate, and nurturer providing a therapeutic gaze offered within a context of safety, trust, and acceptance. If the sitter feels inhibited or begins to self-censor, the phototherapist provides encouragement – a permission-giving context within which the sitter–director can explore the full range of their emotions. One must be so in tune with the other person. This is something established during extensive counselling beforehand to identify the issue or story to be explored and, afterwards, to process the emotions that the re-enactment brought to the surface.

While the work is emotionally intense it is also playful. Think of how children use fantasy play to re-enact scary troubling scenarios, or to try out different roles. In play, the child is the active agent, controlling and transforming the outcome. In re-enactment phototherapy, the body actively performs socially constructed roles and meanings rather than passively containing them.

There are also some parallels with performance art, but the drama enacted is one’s own. The photographic sessions are not about capturing the moment but encouraging it to take place. It is about inhabiting the images. And for this, the photographer–therapist must be completely in tune with the sitter–director. For the work to be truly therapeutic it is important to identify a transformative goal – a shift to challenge old belief systems – for the sitter–director to reach at the end of the session.

I enjoyed both roles: the photographer–therapist and the sitter–director. The challenge of giving someone else the images that she wanted in order to express the feelings that lay behind the story being told was immense and, when I succeeded, very gratifying. It’s not about posing, but rather capturing things as they happen. One must work intuitively. It is the emotional weight that guides me both in image making as the photographer, and when re-enacting my stories in front of the camera.

As an example of how this process of re-enactment works, could you talk about the making of ‘Guilt-edged Bonds’.

I had noticed that I felt a certain anxiety when I bought strawberries. I talked with Jo about my mother’s oft-repeated story of deprivation and re-enacted it with carefully chosen props and clothes to create a sense of the period…

My mother was the third child in a family of six. She described her father as a kind man, but hinted that her mother was a hard woman, overworked by making do. In 1916, while her father was away fighting at the front, my mother was sent to the corner shop to buy a spoonful of jam. It was her sixth birthday and this was her only present. She spread the jam thinly to cover the slice of dry bread, longing for her much loved father – in fear for his life: would he ever come back? – learning to make do with so much less than she wanted or needed…

By re enacting this fragment I experienced my mother’s pain, uncertainty, fear of loss, and sense of desertion. It was overwhelming. I became much more aware of how little nurturing my mother had received as a child. How she had learnt, so very young, to suppress her own needs and attend instead to those of others.

In the 1950s, strawberries were a rare treat. My mother would only ever take one, which she’d skilfully cut into thin slices and spread on a slice of bread. I would happily scoff the lot, until I looked up and saw my mother’s self-imposed deprivation. She would gaze at me with tenderness, yet I perceived martyrdom. I then felt guilty and wanted to share… Her silent reproach echoed down the years as she became my role-model of the ‘needy helper’.

When I restaged this old family ritual between myself and my mother, I had a sudden realisation. Her single strawberry spread across a slice of bread looked just like that infamous bread and jam from 1916. Viewed from her position, she was giving me the plenitude she’d wanted as a child. I was acting out her suppressed needs. But she also believed that she had to socialise me for disappointment. She said “You can’t have what you want” so often that, as an adult, I have had difficulty articulating my own needs.

How did you continue this process and practice following the death of Jo Spence in 1992?

Jo and I had evolved our innovative way of working through experimentation, learning from our mistakes as well as our insights. After Jo’s death, I developed this modality further, training as a psychological therapist and primarily working in that role. I use formal contracts and boundaries, so that the client feels adequately held and contained. In this way of working, I begin as a counsellor in order to establish a therapeutic relationship with each client, only moving on to use photography if and when the client choses to.

How did you develop the phototherapy workshops for groups?

This required me to analyse my methodology and process carefully in order to share it effectively – simplifying it and then turning it into a detailed program. I used to do intensive experiential workshops lasting five days, which were brilliant if exhausting. I concentrated on creating a safe and secure framework for this work to happen within and to ‘hold’ the group dynamics so that every participant felt heard and seen. The final day, when participants shared their work with the group, was cathartic because this work does open up often deep and difficult issues through performance, risk taking, and play. Participants often worked on aspects of their lives they had not previously dared to examine. Re-enactment phototherapy is a powerful modality that must be used carefully and responsibly. It’s potentially life changing.

[Left] © Rosy Martin ‘My father, in his coffin with my re-enactment of him.’ 1990
[Right] © Rosy Martin ‘Too Close to Home?’ 1990

How did you use this knowledge to make your own personal work?

After my father died I felt his presence so intensely within the family home. He had made this 1930s semi-detached suburban working-class house beautiful – even elegant – through his creativity and skills in carpentry, interior design, furniture, curtains, his paintings … everywhere I looked, everything I touched reminded me of him. By this time, my mother was very old and I was determined to support her in continuing to live in her home. I wanted to somehow hold onto my parents. But it’s impossible. I could not stop time, so I decided to photograph the details of this, my childhood home, knowing the power of photographs to evoke memories. Yet, over the next fourteen years, the work became instead a document of incremental deterioration in my mother’s health as I became her carer. She did not want to be photographed and I, of course, respected that. So, in the series ‘Too close to home?’, I used the metonymy of objects, stilled lives, as a way of exploring pre-bereavement.

I held onto the house after my mother died, returning to photograph in a vain attempt to stop time. I was deep in mourning and each object was resonant with the touch, the smell, the very beings who had moved into this place when it was newly built, making it their home for seventy-four years…. I had become the curator of this museum of sources. ‘The End of the Line’ is a meditation upon loss and grief as I photographed through my tears. The images are about how it feels as it appears, as if fleetingly.

I made slides of old family-album photographs my parents had taken of each other the day war was declared. They were holding onto a fragile moment, yet they look strained, anxious. I projected these images onto the place in the house where the originals had been shot, photographing the result. I printed this work onto gossamer-fine silk which, when hung in a slight breeze, shimmers like a ghostly presence.

When did you return to working collaboratively on artmaking?

I concentrated upon being the phototherapist for many years, working with clients and running intensive phototherapy workshops. But I did miss the collaborative way of working and, in 1997, began ‘Outrageous Agers’ with Kay Goodridge.

What led you to this theme?

I first took on this issue of ageism when I turned fifty. Looking back now, as a woman in my seventies, this could seem to have been a little premature. But the lived reality for women is that once the perimenopause starts the brutal awareness kicks in of how mainstream media and the language of advertising misrepresents, or even worse, just ignores older women. Caught in that too familiar dilemma between disavowal and acceptance, many women spend nearly half their lives denying or defying their chronological age. It was and is important to me to challenge the stereotypes of ageing women that suggest decline, loss of sexuality, and redundancy.

Prompted by anger, defiance, risk taking, we ignored the implicit sign ‘no woman over thirty need enter’ and re-visited Top Shop to try on our fears. Squeezed into the frame, our bodies mirror the desire and discontent at the perceived loss of the impossible ‘perfect’ body. When exhibited, these images are presented in lightboxes, both citing and challenging fashion and advertising photography.

In a very different series, theoretical texts were projected onto our carefully posed ageing bodies to challenge the inscription of medical, psychoanalytic, and cultural discourses upon the female body. The authority of such normative and clinical prescriptions is undermined by the exuberance and vitality of the living, breathing body. Flesh overpowers word since the text can only be read where the projection falls upon the body.

In 2017, you began working with Verity Welstead on a series of projects under the rubric of ‘Gravity Gravitas’. What were you exploring here?

When you become ‘old’, you embody everyone else’s fear of decrepitude and the uncertainty of life itself. We turned the camera unflinchingly on our own real, lived-in bodies, examining them for those infamous ‘signs of ageing’ that advertisers and the media focus upon: wrinkles, widening waistlines, sagging bellies… We made these phenomena strange through extreme close-up and tight cropping. How mysteriously could we show our bodies so that the viewer would be uncertain as to what they were looking at?

We found these acts of defamiliarisation a very useful strategy. For many women, surveying their bodies is too often loaded with feelings of disgust and disaffection learnt from the mass media and the internet’s repeated presentation of unattainable perfection. This was an ongoing process of moving towards acceptance by facing our fears. We played with scale, enlarging the images of our bodies until they became like aerial views of landscape. Over time, our attitudes to these images changed, shifting from initial horror to amusement as we embraced the realities of who we were.

We played with the ‘poor women’s facelift’ – something most women try when looking in the mirror [below]. But what if we valued wrinkles? What if we searched each morning for new wrinkles as a sign of beauty? Could our images begin to reveal this shift to acceptance?

If gravity wins, as indeed it must, when will older women be honoured for their gravitas?

Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in feminist activism in the art of the seventies and eighties with, for example, the exhibition ‘Women in Revolt’ at Tate Britain. Why do you think this is happening now?

Well, it is about time! Until very recently, most of this work has been overlooked by institutions and galleries. It may reflect the current activism in the younger generation and a sense of the need for change. Many of these artists are reaching the end of their active lives, and it is much better to have the work on show while they are here to comment upon it and discuss it with the audience. The show has proved very popular. I hope it will inspire the next generation.

What has phototherapy taught you?

A lot! It is hard to isolate the learning from the evolution of the self. Phototherapy images are confronting – challenging – even upsetting! I make and exhibit images of my aging body, but do I totally accept them? Yes, but only up to a point. Ageing and my current disability post knee replacement are an ongoing challenge. It would be fatuous to claim that phototherapy can deal with this. But it does help me to visualise aging and to challenge dominant societal representations of the body.

Over the years, phototherapy has enabled me to understand and come to terms with my childhood and adolescent traumas; to explore my parents’ histories; to gain deeper understanding and forgiveness, and to reclaim an image of my loving mother, who I had lost to ravages of dementia.

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She has received a number of accolades including the Melchelt Memorial Award for Socially Responsible Design from the Design and Industries Association (1979), the South Bank Photo Show Prize, London (1989), and winner of the What Does Obesity Mean to You? award, London (2003). Over the years, Rosy Martin has built a substantial theoretical framework underpinning and extending her innovative practice, publishing her research in over forty academic books and journals, as well as more mainstream art, cultural, and political magazines. She has gone on to present her findings as an invited keynote speaker at more than twenty professional and academic conferences and workshops in the United Kingdom and overseas. She lives and works in London.

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This interview is a Talking Pictures original.

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