In 1974, photographers Terry Dennett Jo Spence made repeated visits to 'illegal' Gypsy and Traveller sites in and around London. They got to know the people who lived there, documenting their lives in sound and image. The results of their project never formed a dedicated exhibition or a comprehensive publication, either then or since. Our Studio Was The World makes this powerful and still strikingly relevant work accessible to a new audience, with freshly scanned (and in some cases newly discovered) images and previously unpublished texts. As Dennett commented, Gypsies and Travellers were 'persecuted terribly... talk about the Nazis!' Today, they remain socially marginalised, over-policed and discriminated against.
Together and individually, Terry Dennett and Jo Spence are among the most influential figures in radical British photography, with their impact extending far beyond image-making - into publishing, exhibiting, teaching and shaping photographic theory. Our Studio Was The World is the first in a ground-breaking trilogy of books - alongside Terry Dennett: The Crisis Project and Jo Spence: The Unknown Recordings - which explores their unpublished work, ideas and committed socialist perspective.
Introductory note
Terry Dennett: Texts
Mark-ups
Contact sheets and frames
Prints
Exhibition prints
Postscript: Fighting Discrimination Against the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller
Community | John Bowden
Sources and notes
Terry Dennett (1938-2018) was a pioneering British photographer, curator, educator and theorist. A committed socialist, Dennett dedicated his career to using photography as a tool for political education, social documentation and cultural critique. From the 1970s onward, he collaborated closely with Jo Spence, co-founding the Photography Workshop. His long-running Crisis Project, which spanned nearly four decades, sought to accumulate visual evidence of social inequality and structural injustice in Britain. As a teacher and archivist, Dennett played a key role in shaping debates around photographic theory and practice, influencing generations of photographers and activists.
Jo Spence (1934-1992) was a British photographer, writer and cultural worker whose groundbreaking work helped to redefine the role of photography in feminist and radical practice. Beginning her career in commercial photography, she moved into documentary and political work in the 1970s, co-founding the Photography Workshop with Terry Dennett. Her practice combined autobiography, therapy and activism, most notably in projects such as The Picture of Health?, which chronicled her experience with breast cancer through the lens of photo therapy. Spence's work interrogated class, gender, and representation, challenging dominant visual narratives and advocating for photography as a means of personal and collective empowerment. Her influence endures in contemporary debates on identity, illness, and the politics of the image.
