Jo Spence visited Trent Polytechnic when I was a student there in the early 80's. I think she came with her collaborator Rosie Martin. She was well known in British photography at the time and acknowledged (though not necessarily admired very widely) for her strong socio-political approach to her image-making, as well as for its intensely personal nature. She was not the usual sort of visiting photographer and she seemed fairly unimpressed being invited to present her work to us and had little to say. I don't think she had much time for us young students (kids, really). She was not the usual 'artist' type, that's for sure.
Her photographs dealt with honesty about the repulsive reality of human bodies (fleshy self-portraits defying the conventions of female beauty) and admittedly I found the work unappealing. It was defiantly antagonistic to just about everything and she was quite intimidating. In retrospect she probably had far more serious issues in her life at that point and looking for a positive response from us was not the highest of priorities for her. In fact it was actually very rare that anyone met with much positive feedback from our course even if we liked them (not many would even show up for these talks) and her visit was similarly low key all around. I remember it as being slightly bitter and a bit sad, in some unappetising way. She had made her point, though and yet she has had minimal lasting recognition until very recently. She was dedicated to producing critical, highly-constructed feminist, left-wing image making with little regard for galleries or photography art-world infrastructure (what little there was of it in this county then) at a time when there were still fairly few noted women photographers around. (Environmentalist Fay Godwin perhaps being the other notable exception, who was also pretty much self-taught.) She was as much, if not more, an activist than an artist.
Stangely some of tbe details of her background and her use of self-image and transgression overlap with where I've sort of ended up decades later.