30.06. – 01.07.2026 | Talk and workshop
Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe: PROPERTYLESS SUBJECTS
TALK
This talk introduces the life and work of Terry Dennett (1938–2018), a British photographer, historian, and curator who—although relatively little known today—played a crucial role in the development of socially engaged photography in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. With his partner Jo Spence (1934–1992), Dennett formed The Photography Workshop and was a founding editor of the influential magazine Camerawork.
The lecture focuses on Dennett’s early practice in the 1970s and the participatory workshop methods he developed to teach children—and sometimes adults—to use photography as a tool for self-education and political expression. Situating his work within the specific social infrastructure of 1970s London, particularly the network of council-run arts and community facilities, the presentation traces how Dennett synthesised a wide range of influences—from the Soviet avant-garde and the Weimar-era Worker Photography movement to post-1968 community activism—into a distinctive practice shaped by the material and institutional conditions around him.
WORKSHOP
This workshop aims to metabolise Dennett’s pedagogical methodology and photographic practice. Using materials from Dennett’s archive and inviting participants to investigate the construction of shared and socialised subjectivity within Dennett’s work. We will focus on his workshops at South Island Place and his long-running street photography project The Crisis Project (1974–1992) which documented urban destitution, homelessness, and shop foreclosure. These two sides of Dennett’s practice are rarely considered together but the workshop proposes a negative identification between the two interests— children and the dispossessed— both categories without the right or ability to own property; who therefore exist outside of the frame of bourgeois subjectivity, defined legally by property relations.
We will look at Dennett’s archival materials, photographs, research documents, and plans for practical sessions to understand the representations of collective subjectivity made possible by the conditions of the time. However the purpose of the session is for participants to think with the textured materiality of Dennett’s photography practice, of which the image is only one small element, and develop a conversation about possible aesthetic strategies that represent the way we live now. Our relationship to the city, to collaboration, and co-habitation.
Set Reading:
Doris Lessing, “Preface,” in The Golden Notebook
(London: Fourth Estate, 1972)
R.D. Laing “The Family and the ‘Family’” in The Politics of the Family
(London: Pelican Books, 1971)
Lisa Robertson “Spatial Synthetics: A Theory” in Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture
(Coach House Books, Vancouver, 2011)
Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe, “The Photography Workshop: Propertyless Subjects.” Terry Dennett: Subject of History. Excerpt from PhD dissertation
(Birkbeck College, London, 2025)
BIO
Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe is a writer, curator, and art historian based in London. Her writing on contemporary art, performance, and documentary has appeared in numerous publications, and she has curated exhibitions and public programmes internationally. She is completing a PhD on British documentary photography at Birkbeck, University of London, where she also teaches.
Talk
31.06.2026 7 pm
Studio Widmann A 2.30