You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
When those in the analytic community make reference to wider cultural forms for purposes of metaphor or of illustration of psychic processes they generally turn to a ‘high cultural’ medium of expression such as art or literature rather than popular culture. Photography is likely to be overlooked as part of a flickering world of superficial appearance and bound up with instrumental and commercial imperatives and ways of thinking. It seems to be an irredeemable aspect of mass culture: ephemeral, banal, insubstantial. But photography is central to the twentieth-century symbolic landscape and firmly integrated into the ways we manage our identities and have them managed for us. There can be few of us who have not attempted to control our image of ourselves by posing for a photograph or tearing up the one that makes us feel uncomfortable. The use of the camera is now essential to the experience of weddings, birthdays, holidays, and other rites of passage. Photography thus operates at the boundaries of the private world of the family and the publicly encoded world of photographic conventions residing in such genres as the amateur snapshot and the high-street studio portrait. In the context of photographic education and cultural theory Jo Spence had since the mid-70s pioneered a polemical dissection of the hallowed distinctions between inner and outer, public and private, personal and political. In particular she was concerned with how the family album represses the