Jo Spence was a feminist artist and activist who explored themes of gender, class and self-identity. After Spence was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1982, she made several series of self-portraits documenting her battle with the disease until her death from leukaemia a decade later. The photographs expressed her physical and emotional state. Her doctor and collaborator Tim Sheard explained, ‘Spence is representing the honest emotions felt living in an unruly body that cannot conform to the pressures of female perfection expected and idealised in Western society’.

Working in collaboration with psychoanalyst Rosy Martin, Spence developed a co-counselling practice they called 'phototherapy', which aims to resolve emotional issues, anxieties or past traumatic experiences through role play and photographic portraiture. In this image, Spence addresses her difficult relationship with her mother by imagining her at a period of her life before Spence's birth. The photograph documents her process of dressing up and acting the part as she attempts to empathise more profoundly with her mother as an individual, with experiences and hardships of her own beyond the role of motherhood.

Jo Spence (1986) Putting Myself in the Picture, London: Camden Press.