One million postcards: Jill Posener's feminist eye returns to UK galleries

More than 1 million postcards have sold since Jill Posener photographed a graffitied Fiat billboard on London's Farringdon Road in November 1979. She printed roughly 100 copies first, in a small West End print shop, and says she never made much money from them. Profit was never the point. The postcards, she said, carried "a big fuck you to the establishment".

The billboard carried a sexist joke by design: "If it were a lady it would get its bottom pinched." The reply — "If this lady was a car she'd run you down" — Posener has been repeatedly accused of writing herself. She denies it. Two women working at the nearby offices of the socialist newspaper Morning Star painted it, she recalls from her home in California. "They had seen the billboard go up and were so incensed that they came up with this solution," Posener says. "They didn't think anything of it until they saw the postcard. I sent them a whole bunch and we all had a good laugh."

Posener calls the advert defaced — or, in her preferred term, refaced. The image became her signature brand of political satire, produced while the women's liberation and gay rights movements clashed with Margaret Thatcher's socially conservative Britain. The work, she says, explicitly "railed against the stereotype of the humourless lesbian or humourless feminist".

Why did the picture come back in 2023?

More than four decades on, the Fiat image featured in Tate Britain's 2023 exhibition Women in Revolt. Posener had shifted to animal welfare work more than a decade earlier. "I had absolutely walked away from photography," she recalls. "So I do credit the Tate show with – and I don't mean to sound dramatic – giving me my old life back."

That revival produced institutional interest and, now, Jill Posener: Stage and Street at Glasgow School of Art, open until 9 January. It is her most significant UK solo show and the first to survey a 50-year career in full.

What does the retrospective cover?

• Her years with Gay Sweatshop, Britain's first professional gay theatre troupe
• Party-conference photography for the Daily Mirror
• The influential 1987 series A Dirty Girls Guide to London
• Lesser-known examples of wry billboard graffiti

Now 73, Posener is stoic about the overdue recognition. "I think part of it is that I'm not a particularly gifted photographer," she says, "and I'm not being self-deprecating. But I am somebody that sees things, and it's possible that I can see things others don't."

Does one image still define her? "I think, if you have one image that so encapsulates a moment, a movement, then embrace it," she says. "I have no problem being a one-hit wonder."

Which pictures anchor the show?

Join Lesbians United, London, 1981. "Maybe because I've lived with a lot of anger in my life, I loved that we could respond to these things with humour," she says of the image.

A promotional photo for Any Woman Can, performed by Gay Sweatshop in 1976. Its last line: "You're looking at a screaming lesbian, and I'm looking right back at you." For Posener, it reflected both her coming out and her confrontational nature.

Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Women's Conference, London, 1987. "Thatcher in the creche was just the most hilarious thing I could possibly imagine," she says, though she sometimes feels embarrassed about mocking that audience.

From A Dirty Girls Guide to London, 1987: two women kissing, saying "We can do this right here, in front of everybody." "It's about not hiding, and it's about saying: 'You cannot control our lives and you cannot control our bodies.'"

Drew Griffiths performing in Jingleball, a Gay Sweatshop production, 1976 — eight years before his unsolved murder. "He was too ashamed to face the media, so he had his back to them, even though he'd started the group," Posener recalls. "And I think that's what we all felt: this terrible fear, and yet this hope and possibility of something new."

The show runs to 9 January at Glasgow School of Art, giving UK audiences their first full view of a career built on seeing what others miss.