I Framed My Breast for Posterity. Cibachrome print. 19 5/8 in. x 27 1/2 in. (49.85 cm x 69.85 cm). Gift of Jo Spence Memorial Archive. 2001.18.10
The female nude has not historically provoked empathy, but that is the beginning of what Jo Spence accomplishes in this self-portrait. Spence, a british feminist who was renowned for her work focusing on ‘women’s work’ and it’s various forms in public and private spaces, took the photo as part of a series documenting her struggle with breast cancer. The title reveals all— the threat of a full mastectomy, the reality that her body, her breasts and her womanhood were to be forever altered and her profound sense of purpose.
From the title, which compels us to ask ‘for whose prosperity? why?’, to the fact that it is a self-portrait, there is no escaping her reclamation of her own body as a medium for her art or the assertion of her identity as artist over that of a patient or a woman. She is nude but the photo is nostalgic and clinical rather than strictly sensual. Spence may strike a vulnerable pose with closed eyes and hidden mouth, she is not being ‘looked upon’; she is deliberate with and responsible for every detail, each of which read like parts of one-half of a phone call. Her breasts hang heavy— asymmetrical, unevenly lit and bandaged unlike those of the Venus which are defined by faint shades and pale colors.
She depicts her breasts and thus herself not as an object for the viewing pleasure of others like Venus but a proper body of flesh that is vulnerable to illness, both vital to her life and marred by it. She questions then what it means to value her breasts as part of her body rather than an object of sexual titillation and ultimately, what it means to be a woman.
Sources:
Bell, Susan E. “Photo Images: Jo Spence’s Narratives of Living with Illness.” Health, vol. 6, no. 1, 2002, pp. 5–30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26646406. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020.