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Jill Posener was born in 1953 in Greenwich, London, and now lives in Berkeley, California. Jill trained as a
stage manager at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. She was the first female member of
Gay Sweatshop, Britain's first gay professional theatre company, and wrote the company's first
lesbian play, Any Woman Can, in 1974.
Since she took up photography, her work has been shown in over ten major exhibitions, including solo shows at London's Photographers' Gallery, and has appeared in publications ranging from the Daily Mirror to the New York Times Book Review. Her work also has been commissioned as cover art for books by Dorothy Allison and Susie Bright. Jill is the founder and a partner of the publishing company Picture This. She was the photo editor for On Our Backs from 1988 to 1989, and has lectured at CalArts and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her two books of political graffiti photos, Louder Than Words and Spray It Loud, together sold more than 35,000 copies. Jill is a contributor to the books Out in America, Dagger, Stolen Glances and Uncommon Heroes. |
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Essay by Susie Bright - from Nothing But the Girl Nothing But the Butch - Interview with Photographer Jill Posener - ICON, September 1996 Darkroom Mistress - Anchorage Press |
| On coming out - "When I was fifteen, I said to my mother, 'I think I'm a lesbian.' I had recently seen the D.H. Lawrence film The Fox [which features a lesbian relationship]. I went to the movie theatre on my own, and I came away with this blinding headache - you know, that kind of throbbing in your head whey you've just been told you have a fatal disease. My whole body was shuddering." |
On graffiti and her own activist coming of age -
"I would sometimes go in my car, cruise the streets up and
down with my camera... it was appearing everywhere. Graffiti was this wonderful explosion of a voice given to
people who didn't have a voice in politics at that time." |
On photographing lesbian erotica -
"I began to photograph a new community for myself, a new
set of people that I had never seen before, a new set of ideas I'd never thought of before. For me it was on a continuum
of what I'd always done. It was simply an extension of women taking control of their own lives and expressing desires
in a way that was most appropriate for them. Women were taking it further and saying, not only do we have the right to
be lesbians, but we have the right to express ourselves in ways that traditionally, women were not supposed to express.
We were sexual beings, and we were going to talk about it." |
On feminist politics -
"Those of us on the feminist side were already adopting severely anti-gay positions, like 'Gay men are only interested
in sex. Gay men are promiscuous, out cottaging [cruising] all the time, they put sex before politics'... I found myself not
able to work with men, rejecting men who had been my earliest friends. I found that the only people I could survive with were
other lesbian feminists. I couldn't even stand the heterosexual feminists who started talking about having a lesbian experience;
I was disgusted by that. After a while, you get disgusted by everybody. It was a bit like reducing the gravy until there's nothing
left at the bottom of the pan." |