Fairy Tales and Photography, or, Another Look at Cinderella (Paperback)

Description

“Cinderella,” writes Jo Spence, “is alive and well.” Alive not only in the pages of children’s books or on the stage, in advertising images and news stories, she inhabits our innermost feelings about what’s right and wrong, our family relationships, our fantasies and aspirations. In Spence’s ambitious undergraduate degree dissertation, published in full for the first time here, the pioneering photographer, cultural worker and educator explores how the Cinderella story has come to pervade cultural consciousness through images of femininity, from beauty queens to royal brides, that serve a “class mythology of romantic love as a means of social mobility for girls.”

Written in 1982, while Spence was a mature student at the Polytechnic of Central London (now University of Westminster), Fairy Tales and Photography, or, another look at Cinderella is richly reproduced in facsimile and accompanied by Class Slippers, an illuminating analysis of Spence’s thesis by Frances Hatherley. Text-heavy, with no page numbers, the dissertation is slightly unwieldy but nonetheless absorbing to read, an experience enhanced by the presence of handwritten amendments scribbled over the typewritten text. Spence chronicles the fairytale’s history and evolution, charting how its form, meaning and uses have fluctuated over time, even as certain themes persist. She methodically presents and lists an array of material, including but by no means limited to: Ladybird book illustrations, wood carvings, postcards, toys, magic lantern slides, Disney merchandise, newspaper clippings, glossy adverts, ballet production pamphlets.

Cinderella, she finds, has always been a cipher for the preoccupations of a given audience. As the story is increasingly aimed at a mass-market readership, greater emphasis is placed on the “rags to riches” aspect. The lesson for a young woman is that their only possible route to success is through good looks and good manners. It’s their femininity, their desirability to a rich and powerful male suitor that will provide a ticket out of domestic drudgery and a source of self-worth. Other characters have their own ideological agendas, says Spence. The Ugly Sisters and the Stepmother warn of the perils of vanity or the dangers of female sexuality, while the animals who help Cinderella represent a servant class whose sole purpose is to make their masters happy.

Most interesting are the passages where Spence identifies traces of Cinderella within her own work, initially as a commercial photographer shooting romantic wedding portraiture, later resisting this in work on the lives of traveller families, photo-activism with the Hackney Flashers about female domestic labour or a project about her brother’s divorce. Photography and fairytales have much in common in their overlap of fantasy with reality. Before photography became associated with science and evidence, she reminds us, it was “seen very much as a magical medium”. Still transformative, we use it to project idealised versions of the self or the family to others.

But it’s in another medium, the popular, bawdy bricolage of pantomime, that Spence identifies a liberating force that she can channel through photography as a radical tool for critique and empowerment. The research she did for this dissertation, particularly related to pantomime, laid the groundwork for a new way of thinking about her photography, evident in her collaboration with Terry Dennett and Rosy Martin, Only when I got to fifty did I realise I was Cinderella. A kind of “photo pantomime,” this work plays on the residual “slippage” between imaginative and rational seeing that stays with us from childhood. As she writes in the dissertation,“Fantasy doesn’t invent another world, it inverts or recombines elements of this world to create new or strange effects.”