New Portraits for Old: The use of the Camera in Therapy

Abstract

The images and text reproduced here have had several functions for us. They were produced by us both in the course of work we were doing together as co-counsellors, but they are also part of large individual projects, and part of work we are doing in a women's photography group on Identity Crisis. Co-counselling is a non-hierarchical, inexpensive way of training to discharge past hurts and griefs as well as being a two-way non-evaluative talking and listening contract between people.1 We met at an ILEA evening class run in North London by Peter Clark. As unemployed people it cost us £1.00 each to join. In this instance we were working on childhood memones, taking as our starting point a photograph which was significant for Jo as the site of trauma, and for Rosy as a site of pleasure. In the session from which these photographs were drawn we worked to produce a senes of different images of ourselves. We started with a pre-conceived idea of what we wanted to disrupt, replace and rework, and worked within this framework. Integral to this work is a shared politics both of feminism and of a demystification of photographic practice. As feminists we take it for granted that current dominant images of women should be continually questioned and, if necessary, challenged, but we find the notion of 'positive' images a limited one in that it ignores how meaning is constructed, or how subjectivity is produced. Since it is rather a fixed way to discuss photography, we prefer to explore the construction of images, to understand the cross-over between what feels personal and what is public, and given wide circulation. Playing with ways of presenting ourselves to camera was a way of doing this. Our individual explanations of how we did it and to what effect follow later. We are not trying to give a definitive explanation of what we did, or what we hoped to achieve. Rather we are offering it as an example of a new photographic practice which could be taken up in therapy, in play, or as a way of asking ourselves new, perhaps awkward, questions, or discovering new ways of having dialogues with ourselves or each other. The traditional portrait in photography is enshrined in a complexity of professional practices and philosophies, typified by the notion that people can be represented by showing