Author Description

Since the mid nineties, the Northern Irish photographer Hannah Starkey has dedicated her work to a labyrinth of ideas surrounding the female experience and the medium of photography. Recognised for her artfully constructed mise-en-scenes in which women of different generations take centre stage, Starkey's colour photographs often arise from close collaborations with actresses, friends or acquaintances she meets on site. Her images combine the subtlest of gazes and gestures with sophisticated forms of lighting, framing, colour and composition, to build multiple narratives that explore the psychological complexity of women. Challenging the aggressive ways in which the media often fetishize and sexualize women, she draws on the languages and techniques of an array of photographic genres to investigate the influence of photography on how it has shaped our ideas of what it means to be female. In Starkey's work, everyday moments of self-reflection or social interaction can take on the gravitas of modernday genre paintings, or the fleeting appearance of a film still. From her early staged scenes in Belfast, to her most recent documentation of the Women's Marches in London, this monograph spans the first twenty years of work by one of the most significant photographic artists of our time.