There is a photograph in Åsa Johannesson’s exhibition at Stills in Edinburgh that stops you.

Not because it shouts. Because it waits.

Each portrait conveys something specific — a glance, a tiny tattoo, creases in a shirt, an awkward poise, a turned neck. These are not symbols. They are specifics. The particularity of a person on a particular afternoon, in front of a fabric backdrop, deciding how to meet a lens. 

The Queering of Photography began in 2015 and ended, in one sense, in 2025. A decade. Which is not a project timeline so much as a life moving through itself.

There is something in the title worth sitting with.

This is a statement about time. About how long identity has been a question. About how the pose a person makes in 2021 rhymes with a pose made in marble two thousand years ago — not because nothing has changed, but because the body asking who am I, and how do I stand? 

Åsa describes the large format portrait as collaborative by necessity, requiring a dialogue: she gives instructions to pose, and the sitter responds and makes suggestions. It is two people in a room, together, finding out what the camera might hold.

What it holds, it turns out, is time.

She is less interested in poses that signal gender bending and more concerned with challenging assumptions about what constitutes a normal portrait. 

That is the sharpest thing in the work, and worth pausing on.

Poems were produced together with the people she photographed — written as monologues, informed by conversations between photographer and sitter some time after the shoot. So means the poetry arrives after the image. After the sitting. 

That structure — image first, words later — is not incidental. It is an argument about how identity works. 

It is the voice that comes once the shutter has closed. The language people reach for afterwards.

You do not simply receive these photographs. They return the look. 

It is free to attend. You just have to be willing to look back.

The Queering of Photography is at Stills, 23 Cockburn Street, Edinburgh, until 27 June 2026. 

So, tell me how far do you go past the surface? (Sometimes examining your own story is the most radical thing available.)  Does it depend on whether you are willing to notice what the surface is doing?