CTSG research seminar 4 May 3-4pm Grand Parade G4 – all welcome!

Situating Queer in Photography 

Åsa Johannesson

This talk focuses on new ways of considering the notion queer in relation to photography. It will include discussions that are rooted in Åsa’s own photographic practice and her forthcoming book Queer Methodology for Photographic Practice and Theory: Situating Queer in Photography.

Åsa works across photography, installations and writing. Her practice examines the relationship between queer identity, representation, and photographic materiality. With a focus on nonconforming gender, it draws from traditional studio portraiture, historical photographic representations of Otherness, and personal narratives surrounding the artist’s own tomboy and twin identity. Åsa has an MA and a PhD from the Royal College of Art and is based in London. She is a Senior Lecturer in Photography at University of Brighton.

The research publication Queer Methodology for Photographic Practice and Theory: Situating Queer in Photography aims to present new ways of approaching photographic discourse from a queer perspective. It offers discussions on what a queering methodology for photography may entail by drawing links between strategies in photographic practice and key theoretical concepts from photography theory, critical theory and philosophy. The book is anchored in the author’s own relation to their photographic practice concerned with queer identity. While primarily addressing photography, the book is entwined with broader philosophical questions concerning identity, difference and the creations of systems of thought that limit existence to established and often dichotomised categorisation. It proposes a new concept of the photographic image that addresses its materiality, in the form of the poetic and the sensuous, in relationship to a generative principle that is named as a queer quality: the photograph’s ability to claim agential movement outside of pre-established measures.