Hannah Starkey by tanyabonakdargallery

HANNAH STARKEY

This catalogue accompanies Hannah Starkey’s solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York on view from January 4 through February 9, 2019, which marks the artist’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery. For more than 20 years, Starkey has dedicated her practice to representing the experiences of women in contemporary society. Blurring the lines between portraiture, documentary, and mediated reality, Starkey carefully reconstructs glimpses of interior lives capturing her subjects in moments of introspection amid ordinary urban spaces. Developing a new way to capture her gender, Starkey’s photographs defy the myopic identities in which women are traditionally portrayed in the thousands of images we see every day. Eschewing the primacy of the male gaze, Starkey’s subjects are presented as feminine protagonists – neither exploited nor worshipped. Over time, Starkey’s focus has evolved with the changes in her own life and the evolving cultural climate. The artists recent series grew to focus on mothers and subsequently middleaged women, a reflection of her own identity, but also a reaction to her realization that this portion of society is largely underrepresented in images. Inspired by the recent social climate catalyzed by the #MeToo movement, paired with the responsibility of raising two teenage daughters, the artist recently chose to document the 2017 Women’s March in London. These recent widespread sociopolitical “by women, for women” efforts to push back on existing male dominated paradigms are, for the artist, a validation of her two-decade exploration of the non-invasive representation of women as the protagonists in her images. By forming a different level of engagement with her female subjects, Starkey’s visual language offers itself as a possible mechanism to deconstruct and diffuse the power of the prevailing patriarchal media definitions of femininity. Capturing women over two decades, Starkey’s cinematic compositions begin to weave together a quiet reflection of not only the female condition but our times overall.

The New York Times Images That Counter Traditional Depictions of Women

The Guardian Photographer Hannah Starkey: ‘I want to create a space for women without judgment’

New Book Hannah Starkey, “Photographs 1997 – 2017”

TateShots Hannah Starkey: ‘This is an Important Moment for Women’

Cover: Paris Mirrors, September 2016 2016 C-print mounted to aluminum dibond in artist frame 49 x 65 x 1 1/2 inches 124.5 x 165 x 4 cm Edition of 5, 2 APs

Images That Counter Traditional Depictions of Women By Jordan G. Teicher

Hannah Starkey knew she was pushing back against expectations when she unveiled a collection of seven images — large, color, constructed photographs exclusively depicting women — at her Royal College of Art graduation exhibition in 1997. “As a young woman you’re supposed to be in front of the camera, not behind it,” Ms. Starkey said. “You’re kind of always on show to be looked at. I wanted to make photos of women where they weren’t on show, where they weren’t that easily consumed.” The work quickly got Ms. Starkey a lot of attention. Within two years of her debut, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate collected her work, The Sunday Times and British Vogue gave her assignments, and Maureen Paley began representing her. But detractors took notice, too. “Maybe because it was of women by a woman, some of the old guard was a bit threatened by it,” she said. “But I don’t take those kinds of things personally. When you’re bringing something new into the world, of course you’re going to piss some people off.” Two decades later, Ms. Starkey is still looking to shake the status quo by continuing to make images that neither glorify nor objectify women. In a new book from MACK, “Photographs 19972017,” Ms. Starkey presents photos spanning the full breadth of her career that show women simply as they are. Ms. Starkey grew up in Belfast in the 1970s, where women served as strong early role models. Her mother was an independent entrepreneur who sold handmade goods at local markets. In the streets, she regularly encountered members of the Peace People, a female-led group protesting the violence of the Troubles.

“I knew what women are capable of,” Ms. Starkey said. Documentary photography was her first love. But as she finished her education at the Royal College of Art, Ms. Starkey began experimenting with a kind of image-making that blended the visual language of documentary with the directorial approach of advertising. She hired actors to pose for her, and added props — reflective surfaces, most frequently — of symbolic significance. In this new approach, she said, psychological truth outweighed literal truth as every element was carefully chosen to elicit her viewers’ empathy. “It was the first time I saw my signature style come out,” she said. “My images were irrefutably mine. They didn’t look like anyone else’s.” At first, in her effort to photograph the human condition, Ms. Starkey hadn’t realized she was almost entirely photographing women. But once she became aware of that, focusing on women became central to her work and her politics. Her artistic mission, she said, was to counteract a visual culture dominated largely by photos of women made by — and for — men. “I believe how you picture people is how they’ll be treated in society,” she said. “There must be a drive for equality in the way people are represented because that will bring real change.” In Ms. Starkey’s photographs, women often appear alone doing ordinary activities — waiting in a dentist office, or gazing through a window. More recently, many of the women are, in fact, ordinary people that Ms. Starkey has recruited off the street to pose for her. But through her lens, these quotidian moments are bestowed an unmistakable emotional gravity.

(continued) Over the years, Ms. Starkey’s choice of subject has evolved alongside changes in her own life. She gave birth to daughters in 2000 and 2002, and consequently mothers and their children have appeared more frequently in her photographs. These days, she finds herself increasingly inspired to photograph middle-aged women. “As a middle-aged woman now, I am absolutely amazed that I don’t feature anywhere in our mainstream visual culture,” Ms. Starkey told the editor and writer Liz Jobey in an interview published in the book. “There aren’t any pictures that I relate to as an older woman. What am I supposed to do, just disappear?” While Ms. Starkey intends for her work to rebuke conventional representations of women, she said she never strove to make “protest images” per se. But last year, at the Women’s March in Trafalgar Square in London, Ms. Starkey found more explicitly rebellious images of female protesters impossible to resist. Rather than employ her usual directorial approach amid the action, she simply captured images as she saw them. “There were so many images comwing at me I couldn’t make them fast enough,” she said. Today, many of those politically engaged women aren’t just intriguing subject matter for photographs; they’re imagemakers themselves. As social media users and professional photographers, Ms. Starkey said, more women are breaking through the kind of barriers she faced early in her career and upending the male-centric gaze that she’s worked for so long to upend. “I think the language is being changed and the aesthetic is being changed,” Ms. Starkey said. “I see it as a revolution.”

Untitled, Paris, September 2016 2016 C-print mounted to aluminum dibond in artist frame 49 x 65 x 1 1/2 inches; 124.5 x 165 x 4 cm Edition of 5, 2 APs

Processions, London 2018 2018 C-print mounted to aluminum dibond in artist frame 49 x 65 x 1 1/2 inches; 124.5 x 165 x 4 cm Edition of 5, 2 APs

Geraldine and the stag, Paris, December 2016 2016 C-print mounted to aluminum dibond in artist frame 49 x 65 x 1 1/2 inches; 124.5 x 165 x 4 cm Edition of 5, 2 APs

“‘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.’” - Hannah Starkey, The Guardian

Installation view, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2019. Photo: Pierre Le Hors

Untitled, Paris, November 2016 2016 C-print mounted to aluminum dibond in artist frame 49 x 65 x 1 1/2 inches; 124.5 x 165 x 4 cm Edition of 5, 2 APs

Untitled, Paris, October 2016 2016 C-print mounted to aluminum dibond in artist frame 49 x 65 x 1 1/2 inches; 124.5 x 165 x 4 cm Edition of 5, 2 APs

Photographer Hannah Starkey: ‘I want to create a space for women without judgment’ By Sean O’Hagan

“When I first started out, photography was very male and not really considered art,” says Hannah Starkey. “I didn’t set out to have a feminist agenda, it was more that my interest in making work about women comes from the simple fact that I am one. That commonality of experience is at the heart of what I do as an artist.” Now 47, Starkey has been making images of ordinary women for more than 20 years, her complex, cleverly choreographed portraits blurring the lines between portraiture, documentary and staging. A new book, Photographs 1997-2017, is a selective survey of an artistic career that started in spectacular fashion when her MA show in 1998 caused quite a stir in the London art world and has since settled into a quiet, consistently attentive exploration of female experience that also implicitly questions how women are represented elsewhere in our profligate image culture. Though her photographs appear at first glance to be traditional observational documentary, they are deftly choreographed. Often she reimagines what she has observed on the street or in cafes, clubs and bars, using women she has hired to meticulously create stilled moments of female reverie,

togetherness or fleeting interaction. The results are both truthful and artfully constructed, capturing the small gestures and glances of everyday experience while also subverting traditional notions of documentary and street photography. “In the beginning, I wanted to create a hybrid out of the different approaches I had been taught,” she says, “by somehow bringing together the emotive language of documentary with the slickness of advertising and the observational style of street photography. I think I’ve become more reflective and considered, but the performative element has been a constant.” Having “wandered into” photography via a vocational course at Napier University in Edinburgh, Belfast-born Starkey went on to study for an MA at the Royal College of Art. There she found her subject and her hybrid style, influenced, she says, by Peter Galassi’s book, Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, which laid bare the anxieties at the heart of the American ideal of home through images by the likes of Nan Goldin, William Eggleston and Cindy Sherman. Her MA show featured seven largeformat photographs of young women interacting, their style and compositional skill self-consciously

‘My clothes are not my consent’, Women’s March, London 2017 2017 C-print mounted to aluminum dibond in artist frame 49 x 65 x 1 1/2 inches; 124.5 x 165 x 4 cm Edition of 5, 2 APs

‘I can’t believe we’re still protesting this shit’, Women’s March, London 2017 2017 C-print mounted to aluminum dibond in artist frame 49 x 65 x 1 1/2 inches; 124.5 x 165 x 4 cm Edition of 5, 2 APs

(continued) referencing both classical painting and elaborate film stills. It caught the attention of London gallerist Maureen Paley, who left a note for her at the college and has represented her ever since. “That graduate show set me up,” says Starkey. “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.” With two teenage daughters of her own, she is concerned about the tyranny of selfie culture and the ways in which young women are “being targeted much earlier as consumers and told constantly that their value is in their looks”. At the same time she is inspired by how younger female photographers are making their presence felt. “It just feels like things are opening up because so many young women are expressing themselves through photography.” Advertisement Though Starkey has always been an implicitly political artist, the concluding series in the book – images of protesters at the Women’s March in London, 2017 – is the closest she has come to more overtly activist photography. Here, too, the images have been created using technological post-production, allowing her to distil the experience of the protest into more formally constructed photographs. She is, she acknowledges in the afterword to the book, “interested in the psychological truth more than the photographic truth.” That, perhaps, is the essence of her hybrid way of seeing.

Installation view, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2019. Photo: Pierre Le Hors

“For all of Starkey’s suspicion of the negative effects of mass-media imagery, particularly of and on women, there’s a joyfulness and an affection for looking and seeing in her pictures. In this spirit, we might detect autobiographical resonances, glints of a shifting mind and eye across the slow accumulation of pictures ... There’s a great freedom, after all, a special pleasure of escape in the act of being in public, of watching and being watched.” – Aperture

‘Fuck the patriarchy not the planet’, Women’s March, London 2017 2017 C-print mounted to aluminum dibond in artist frame 49 x 65 x 1 1/2 inches; 124.5 x 165 x 4 cm Edition of 5, 2 APs

‘Pussy power’, Women’s March, London 2017 2017 C-print mounted to aluminum dibond in artist frame 49 x 65 x 1 1/2 inches; 124.5 x 165 x 4 cm Edition of 5, 2 APs

Installation view, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2019. Photo: Pierre Le Hors

Hannah Starkey, Photographs 1997 – 2017 (MACK Books, 2018) “With an introduction by curator and writer Charlotte Cotton, this new and intriguing publication from MACK Books features important images of women spanning 20 years, from early staged photographs in Belfast to documentation of the 2017 march in London.”

– Aesthetica

Published on occasion of the exhibition Hannah Starkey Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York January 5 — February 9, 2019 All works © Hannah Starkey Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles

TateShots, ‘This is an Important Moment for Women’ The Northern Irish artist talks us through her process when it comes to creating an image and how having young daughters influenced her work. Starkey also gave us an exclusive look at project she worked on with images taken at the Women’s March in London in January 2017.

Back Cover: Mirrors, 2015 2015 C-print mounted to aluminum dibond in artist frame 49 x 65 x 1 1/2 inches; 124.5 x 165 x 4 cm Edition of 5, 2 APs