Hannah Starkey’s photographs capture women and girls in quiet moments of reflection, often as here, doubled and redoubled, literally so. The Belfast-born artist has been creating these images for 25 years, a body of work that is the subject of a full retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield later this month. The pictures, printed on a large scale, exist somewhere between documentary and choreography – Starkey has an eye for private moments and gestures of women in the real-life world of streets and cafes, which she often then recreates using models.
The Hepworth project includes a commitment from Starkey to mentor eight early-career female and non-binary photographers born or based in Yorkshire. The aim is to find new ways to liberate the medium from the male gaze. That determination was first expressed by Starkey in a Royal College of Art degree show in 1997, in images immediately recognised as seeing women view themselves differently. Speaking to the Observer’s Sean O’Hagan in 2018, she said: “That graduate show set me up. Suddenly I was in demand and simultaneously I became very aware of the different space that women occupy in the photography world, both as practitioners and subjects. I have been acutely aware of that ever since, the ways in which women are constantly evaluated and judged. My gaze is not directed in that way. A lot of what I do is about creating a different level of engagement with women, a different space for them without that judgment or scrutiny.”
