Jill Posener – Stage and Street

 Jill Posener – Stage and Street
14th November 2026 – 9th January 2027
Reid Gallery

Stage and Street is the first UK survey of work by Jill Posener, the British photographer well known for documenting feminist graffiti and billboard defacements. Yet it was the stage and not the street that first led Posener to pick up a camera. This exhibition places Posener’s photojournalism in the context of a more than five-decade commitment to social justice, including her involvement in London’s alternative theatre scene in the 1970s and collaborations with performers like Pomo Afro Homos critically confronting racism and homophobia at the height of the crisis surrounding HIV/AIDS in the US. Featuring over fifty photographs and accompanying print ephemera, Stage and Street frames a diverse political and cultural scene with the incisiveness and wit of Posener’s signature style.

Born in London in 1953, Jill Posener trained as a stage manager and in 1973, began working at the pioneering Kings Head Theatre in Islington. She bought her first SLR camera to document the productions there. With encouragement from American queer playwright Robert Patrick, she wrote Any Woman Can, a reflection on her own ‘coming out’, first produced in 1974. In 1976, she became the first woman to join Gay Sweatshop, at the time England’s only professional gay theatre company.

As Jill’s interest in social commentary increased, Posener focused on photography, joining the National Union of Journalist in the late 70s, working as a freelancer in alternative and mainstream media. In 1982, Spray It Loud, her book of graffiti images, was published, followed by a second collection, Louder Than Words in 1986. Posener moved to San Francisco in the late 80s, and met Susie Bright, the editor of On Our Backs magazine, who asked Jill to become the photo editor at the magazine. In 1996, they collaborated on a landmark collection of lesbian erotic photography, Nothing But the Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image. Jill’s photography is a part of a lifetime commitment to social justice and in 2010, seeing the cost of healthcare for pets increase as more people faced economic and housing instability, she founded PAW Fund, a non-profit which nurtures the human / animal bond by providing free veterinary care for the pets of unhoused and low-income pet owners.

The exhibition comes at a pivotal time in Posener’s career, following the inclusion of her work in several landmark exhibitions such as ‘Women in Revolt‘ (TATE Britain, National Galleries of Scotland, the Whitworth Gallery, 2024-25) and ‘Resistance‘ curated by Steve McQueen (Turner Contemporary and National Galleries of Scotland, 2025-26). In recent years, Jill’s photographic work has also been included in various exhibitions including ‘Deep Down Body Thirst’, Glasgow International (2018), ‘Kathy Acker: Get Rid of Meaning’, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2018), ‘Hot Moment’, Auto Italia, London (2020), ‘Au nom du nom. Les surfaces sensibles du graffiti’ and Rencontres d’Arles (2024). She is the subject of ‘Born Kicking’, a short film directed Lauretta Molitor and in 2026, Tate acquired a number of her works for their collection.

Jill Posener – Stage and Street is curated by Dr Laura Guy, Reader in Gender, Sexuality and Culture at the Glasgow School of Art, where she has worked since 2015. For over a decade she has collaborated with photographers whose practice developed in dialogue with lesbian feminist and queer community and activism. She has curated various exhibitions and published extensively in this area, supporting photographers to care for their archives and bring new audiences to their work. In 2021 she curated Contacts, a major retrospective of Phyllis Christopher’s photography at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and is the editor of Christopher’s first artist monograph, Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Protest, 1988-2003 (Book Works, 2022). In Autumn 2026, Laura started work on Preserving Queer Photography: Making and Maintaining Community-led Infrastructures of Care, a two-year research project funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and led collaboratively with colleagues at GSA and Newcastle University.

Part of the Season of Photography 2026, a celebration of photography in Scotland running from 1st September – 20th December 2026.

Image: Jill Posener, Promotional shoot for Blood Group’s ‘Dirt’, London, Soho, 1983.