All my work is basically asking women: How's it going?
Ever since its invention in the 19th century, photography has documented life. At the same time, it focuses on inviting audiences to a rather subjective world, while trying to be taken seriously as an art form. Photography has always been considered a male-dominated profession, but luckily things are changing. Scholars, writers, bloggers, photography students, and enthusiasts have been giving due to the female pioneers of the field. Most were always standing and/or hiding in the shadows, oblivious to how much they could acclaim and accomplish. Arguably, the techniques, concepts, and thematic female photographers use differ from those of male photographers. At a time when most women were convinced that their place was in the kitchen and certainly not in the dark room, some were struggling to surpass their male counterparts and work towards gaining respect and recognition for their work.
Hannah Starkey (British photographer, 1971-) was born in Belfast and currently lives and works in London. She received a B.A. in Photography and Film from Napier University in Edinburgh in 1995 and an M.A. in Photography from the Royal College of Art in London in 1997. She has received numerous awards and honors throughout her career, which include the Vogue Condé Nast Award (1997), the 3rd International Tokyo Photo Biennale's Award for Excellence (1999), and the St. James Group Ltd Photography Prize (2002). In 2000, the artist presented her first major solo exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
Other important solo presentations include Twenty-Nine Pictures at the Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre in Coventry, UK (2011) and Church of Light Altarpiece, a site-specific commission for St. Catherine's Church in Frankfurt (2010). Her work has also been exhibited as part of important group presentations at Tate Liverpool, Huis Marseille Museum for Photography in Amsterdam, Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, France, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, among other museums worldwide. In 2022 Starkey had a major solo exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield, which featured a newly commissioned body of work. Her photographs are represented in the collections of the Tate in London, Huis Marseille Museum for Photography in Amsterdam, Seattle Art Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy, and Centraal Museum in Utrecht.
Quietly contemplative yet intensely evocative, Hannah Starkey's photographs explore the physical and psychological connections between the individual and her everyday urban surroundings. Since the beginning of her career, she has worked predominantly with women as her subjects, collaborating closely with actresses, as well as anonymous acquaintances she meets on-site to develop intricately textured scenes. Stark architectural backdrops and strong associations of color and imagery heighten the sensation of her compositions on both a formal and associative level, triggering personal interpretations and a deeper mediation of the experience of the visual world at large. She describes her work as "explorations of everyday experiences and observations of inner city life from a female perspective".
I’m interested in the psychological truth more than the photographic truth.
We will continue talking about female names that left their mark on photography and about contemporary female photographers who are still to emerge. There are a lot of female photographers out there deserving of praise and we can only hope to cover as many of them as we can. Please follow this space to find out more.
