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In my favourite image of Hannah Starkey: Photographs, 1997-2017, a woman stands with her eyes closed in an empty restaurant. The light falls upon her face and draws a line between her manicured brows. Her eyes are lined, her lips are red; her hair is a brown halo, punctuated by two dropping earrings. She smiles slightly: this is pure bliss, taking in the late afternoon sun, alone in this restaurant. Behind her, the almond green wall is a tapestry of shadows, traces of elements invisible to the camera’s lens. These may or may not be the restaurant’s wooden beams, its hanging lights, and the trees slowly growing through the paved street. But part of me also feels that these may be some of the forms of this woman’s interior landscape, her presence momentarily atmospheric.
The book brings together over ninety photographs Starkey made between 1997 and 2017, from her graduation from the Royal College of Art to the women’s march in London. Throughout those twenty years, Starkey photographed women of all ages, races and wealth. Her protagonists are mostly alone, sometimes in groups, mainly in public and semi-public spaces, rarely at home. We see them in offices, lobbies, hallways, spas, parks, bathrooms, shops, courtyards and restaurants. Spaces from which you come and go, saturated with in-betweenness. The women stand and sit and wait, daydreaming or lost in thought. Each is caught in a moment of un-self-consciousness, as though no one is looking.
But of course someone is looking. Starkey works in the directorial mode, casting the female protagonists, choosing the setting, arranging clothes, props and limbs. Her images have the atmosphere suggestive of a vaster narrative, like stills from films we will never see. And just as the photographer looked then, you and I look now. Turning the pages, I am even physically in the space of these women, with my fingers on the edges of the image. This a closeness the book format allows that I found absent from Starkey’s almost life-size prints when I saw them hung on Maureen Paley’s gallery walls, in 2015.
Starkey speaks of her photographs as attempts to create neutral images of women, ones which aren’t too easy to read, either empowering or exploitative. Hers are pictures about moods and thoughts, and who knows what is going through the minds of these women? You can guess from a pose, from a reaction to a nearby element, from a facial expression, but most of the photographs thrive on a sense of ambiguity. Drive them too hard to conclusions or interpretations and they lose their lovely state of suspension, fickle like a shadow on a wall.
– reviewed for Photomonitor by Edmée Lepercq
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Hannah Starkey: Photographs 1997 – 2017 was published by and is available from MACK. Images courtesy the artist and MACK.
