Hannah Starkey
Photographs 1997 - 2017
When you collect photobooks it’s a small step to collecting photographs. The first picture I bought was at a printsale from the artist collective Trace where all the proceeds went to Crisis and Refugee. A commendable initiative. The print I bought was one of Hannah Starkey: Untitled, October 1998. It’s the one depicting a girl with a Coca-Cola in a pub.
But as a real photobook fan I also wanted the image in a book. However, Starkey doesn’t make bodies of work. Each image is to be encountered and contemplated on its own terms. So, books of her work tend to be selections from her oeuvre. Finally I found the image in Hannah Starkey: Photographs 1997 – 2017.
This book, published in 2018, brings together over ninety photographs Starkey made between 1997 and 2017. From her early staged photographs made in Belfast to her documentation of the 2017 Women’s March in London. Throughout these twenty years, Starkey photographed women of all ages, races and wealth. Her protagonists are mostly alone, sometimes in groups, mainly in public spaces, rarely at home. The women stand and sit and wait, daydreaming or lost in thought, caught in a moment of un-self-consciousness.
Hannah Starkey (born 1971) is a British photographer. She is born in Belfast and now lives and works in London. Hannah Starkey’s photographs feature women, often situated in everyday urban contexts. Her images reveal moments of private reflection that might otherwise go unseen.
Hannah Starkey has build up a body of work that turns the lens on women and the ways in which photography has shaped ideas about what it means to be female. Starkey constructs portraits of women, driven by familiar narratives, but ones that play on the visual languages of diverse photographic genres including diaristic, street, documentary, cinematic, fine art, and fashion. To subtly probe the ways that women are represented in popular culture. Replacing traditional and patriarchal representations with the female gaze. And in doing so, offering an empathetic representation of women. The images address issues as love and loss and motherhood.
Hannah Starkey: Photographs 1997 – 2017
Photographer: Hannah Starkey
Publisher: Mack Books
Published in 2018
Embossed linen hardback, with tip-in on back cover
27,3 x 28,3 cm, 184 pages
Texts by Charlotte Cotton and Liz Jobey