A series of visual conundrums awaits at Maureen Paley’s London gallery in the form of six large-scale C-type prints by Hannah Starkey. In this small and surreptitious show, Starkey destabilises the certainty of seeing and complicates the act of looking, poking at the paradoxical nature of photography.
The first image in the show is Untitled, January 2023, a riveting and complex scene that incisively describes women’s particular relationship with photography – a subject Starkey has pursued for more than 25 years. The image shows a group of young women – students at Capa College, Wakefield – each engaged in a form of looking. One subject stands on a chair to photograph another, who poses. Two other young women engage in this loop of looking – one gazes up at the subject, the other, her back to the camera, is cast as a silhouette. Behind them, through a window, we glimpse more young women – apparently happily unaware of their subjecthood.
