There’s an image Hannah Starkey describes as her calling card, and it’s displayed at the entrance to her exhibition. Made in May 1997, it shows a young woman in a cafe with her hand on a mirror; initially it seems as if she is looking at herself, but on closer inspection she’s holding a moth against the glass. An older woman wearing rollers is caught in the reflection, looking on from the sidelines.
Starkey, who was born in Belfast in 1971, made this image as part of her final show at the Royal College of Art, so it’s interesting it’s still so important to her. But then Starkey’s final show was an overnight success and this image still represents her work. Over the last 25 years, Starkey has focused on images of women in public spaces, picturing them in moments often otherwise overlooked. Starkey also considers photographs themselves, and our tendency to see them as windows on reality. The image of the young woman in the cafe was set up, as is most of her work.
Hannah Starkey: In Real Life is a large exhibition. There’s a room with pink walls showing Starkey’s first decade of work, a part-yellow room more directly related to politics and a room painted deep red showing recent work. It also includes a mock-up of her studio printouts, some of which include intriguing scrawled notes. There’s one referencing “the beauty industry in a perfect Photoshopped world”, for example, and another a quote from Michelle O’Neill, “There is not a universal woman”.
Starkey’s images are painterly in scale and execution, often showing the subjects lifesize and always carefully composed. Starkey sometimes finds locations then brings women to pose in them; other times she is inspired by a stranger in the street and asks if she can take her photograph. Starkey and her subject will discuss the image together, the artist sometimes suggesting a gesture she’s previously noticed, and quite often concealing the face. Once she’s taken some images, Starkey always shows them to her sitters, and she will only uses shots they love, conscious of what she calls “the camera’s consuming eye”, and of emulating a power dynamic she’s trying to counteract. She has photographed mothers and older women as well as those just out of girlhood, figures often demonised or idealised, or simply not shown at all.
In Real Life highlights a fascinating continuity in her work, a consistency of vision that – less encouragingly – speaks of an issue with the way women are usually depicted. One of Starkey’s images from the 2017 Women’s March in London includes a placard stating “I can’t believe we’re still protesting this shit”; now 51, with more than two decades of photographing women under her belt, Starkey can’t quite believe it either. But in some ways things have radically changed, not least because digital imaging and social media have transformed the landscape. That’s something that preoccupies Starkey. She says it’s now harder to get women to pose because of how they feel in front of the lens, and her exhibition catalogue includes an essay by the child and adolescent psychotherapist Anna Spedding, outlining social media’s parlous impact on girls’ body image.
Starkey’s exhibition is a kind of intervention, a different way of looking at women and at images. She has also mentored seven early career female and non-binary photographers born or based in Yorkshire, whose resulting exhibition, Reframing, Reclaiming, is now on show in The Art House studio hub. In Real Life partly happened because she won the 2019 Freelands award, a grant that helps arts organisations present exhibitions by under-appreciated, mid-career female artists; if initiatives such as the Freelands award and Starkey’s mentorships suggest practical ways our existing culture can open up to more diverse voices, her exhibition shows some of the perspectives they can bring.
• Hannah Starkey: In Real Life is at the Hepworth Wakefield until 30 April.
• This article was amended on 23 October 2022. A previous version described Anna Spedding as a “psychologist”, rather than a child and adolescent psychotherapist.
