"...I am continually asked 'what is photo therapy'? It means, quite literally, using photgraphy to heal ourselves. As a part of my health project I have been working on my stress and anxiety levels, reviewing my life in general and trying to understand the part that psychic life (phantasy/fantasy) plays in my well being,or otherwise. Particularly, I have worked with Rosy Martin, a sister co-counsellor, who shares similar interests and cultural politics with me. Photo therapy should be seen within the broader framework of psychoanalysis and its application to the photography of family life, but should always take account of the possibility of ACTIVE CHANGE. We drew upon techniques learned together from co-counselling, psychodrama, and a technique called 'reframing'.

Using this technique, Rosy and I began to work together to give ourselves (and each other) permission to display 'new' visual selves to the camera. In the course of this work we amply demonstrated to ourselves that there is no single self, but many fragmented selves, each vying for conscious expression, many never acknowledged. We created a range of portraits which were the visual embodiment of our fragmented selves, which still continue to emerge every time we meet to have a photo therapy session. We have found ways of having a dialogue with ourselves about the conflicts and constraints of marriage, or of health, education, aging, class economics and oppression for us as women, and working 'against the grain' around dominant definitions of sexuality and love.

Ways in which I have used the camera therefore include taking naturalistic photographs as things happened to me and around me (what is called documentary photography); staging things specially for the camera; using old personal photographs as a starting point and re-inventing what they mean. The whole technique depends upon expecting photographs to help us to ask questions, rather than supplying answers. Using this framework for photography it is possible to transform our imaginary view of the world, whilst working towards trying to change it socially and economically."

Excerpted from SPARERIB No. 163 FEBRUARY 1986

"...Eight years after the original diagnosis of cancer, with my health now fairly stable, I reflect on the photographic pathways I trod during that time of illness. Switching from agitating about social issues or reworking ideological representations of the nude, into working on something 'personal' was far from easy. In 1983 I realised that the research and raw materials I had gathered, plus the snapshots of my illness could now be used for foregrounding in public what I saw as the inhuman and infantalising treatment of cancer patients. To this end, I applied for £500 from Greater London Arts so that I could produce the touring exhibition The Picture of Health? Because my aniticipated audience were people like myself and my family I decided to use everyday language, though the work was grounded in recent work from discourse theory, psychoanalysis and feminism. Such an approach was in direct opposition to avante garde 'image/text' work or to the usual impetuses of individual health campaigning charities and institutions, carried out by healthy and able-bodied professionals working on behalf of other people. In my case, as an unemployed photographer who was ill, I was in the position to objectify and analyse my own story through images, whilst at the same time objectivley making visible a completely fragmented history. I found this both frightening (exposing myself to criticism from photgraphic peers as well as representing a taboo subject) and helpful (finding solidarity from others like myself). By this way of working I gradually abandoned the 'victim position' and became creatively and productively angry. The representation of everyday lives which have erupted into dis-ease and disabilities of every kind, is something which should be widely debated in photographic circles; it is the point where theory and personal experience intersect around a profound crisis of representation. My struggle to represent this interface was most instructive in my own life and later blossomed into the joint practice of phototherapy with Rosy Martin.

Perhaps it would be useful to share here a few of the ways in which my thinking developed, especially around what I percieved to be my 'mind/body' split, and most particularly as it is estimated that one in four of us will experience cancer in our lifetime. Given that holistic attitudes to cancer were in their infancy in the early 1980s, and that there was no real network to which I could relate and little interest among other photographers, for cancer as a representational issue, this was not an easy task. I therefore had to create a profile by making work available on the traditional educational circuits, hoping that it would get picked up by groups who might benefit most from a discussion of the issues I tried to raise. I wrote several critical articles which also helped to create a climate for the work. In The Picture of Health? I wanted to make clear that there were alternative approaches to breast cancer which orthodox doctors seemed to be incapable of discussing with patients. In my case, consultations were often just a series of veiled threats that I might kill myself by disobeying doctors if I continued to seek a more holistic approach to my health. In Part 1 of the exhibition several contradictory threads are interwoven with a critique of the 'cancer industry' which dominates enlargements of my snapshots of the process of hospitalisation up to the moment of being operated on. This is contexted with details from later research on nutritional and self help therapy, plus questions about how to represent a body in crisis. I tried to make clear that some self help methods could be used alongside orthodox treatments but that medically I had opted for Traditoinal Chinese Medicine. The work was contexted by panels on my personal history, for example my mother's death cetificate showing that she died of cancer, as against family snapshots which categorically seemed to deny any notion of illness in my family. I also included early photo therapy work done with Rosy in which I had re-enacted the trauma of being marked up for breast amputation.

Excerpted from the chapter "No I can't do that, my oncologist wouldn't like it" in Silent Health: Women, Health and Representation (published by Camerawork,1990.)