Image description: A young black woman stands centre frame reading the blurb on the back of a VHS tape in a film rental store. There are three other young women in the scene scattered in a very perfect and composed way. One of the three women watches and waits for her presumed friend reading in the centre, the other two women are independently reading their respective boxes. The women are dressed as if it’s cold outside, wearing long coats. The room is lit by a neon red LED tube. There are two TVs in the room but they are both blank and turned off. Each woman is simply picking a film from the store. 

“I really think that visual culture is the last battleground for women’s equality and freedom” Hannah Starkey - Photographs 1997-2017 via Bildband

A British Irish photographer staging public scenes populated with women actors; Hannah Starkey explores “the woman” in the public world and liminal space. In each scene Starkey has directed each character with intention and placed them in semi real environments populated with props. Each actor could be a representation of womanhood in the public world but a womanhood partly free of its patriarchal constrictions. These women have agency and are the subjects of these images. The women in her images are curious, bored, introspective, contemplative and in some instances scared, apprehensive, strong, alienated - all a wide spectrum of human emotion and being. Her work uses specific symbols like mirrors to push through her narrative.

Her most well known collection of work, which is untitled, asks us to consider woman as protagonist in a world where popular culture is patriarchal leaning, reflecting mostly the male perspective of even human banality and the human condition. There are no men in Starkey’s most well known works, only women interacting with the world around them, within themselves and other women. She references cinema in the way she composes her images and through a medium that has inherent film still-like qualities; Bildband puts it nicely calling them “cinematic mise-en-scenes”.

“I thought I was photographing the human condition and I thought women, like man, can stand for the human condition.” Hannah Starkey - ‘This is an Important Moment for Women’ via TateShots

She asks you to contemplate the representation of women in popular media by adopting the cinema template. A more succinct way of describing Starkey’s work: it is photography that highlights female gaze.

“I couldn’t just stick a camera in someone’s face: I thought that was really intrusive,” she says. “I needed a system where everyone was happy with the process and it wasn’t exploitative. I give someone my card and they go and think about the idea first.” Photographer Hannah Starkey: ‘All my work is basically asking women: How’s it going?’ via The Guardian

On a personal level and as an artistic practice deep dive - what I really appreciate about Starkey’s process is that she stages her photographs because she feels a responsibility to be non-intrusive. Her work is a blend of street photography and staged photography in that she stages scenes she comes across in real life. Not wanting to be intrusive to the person in that real life scene she will recreate what she has seen, sometimes with the same person as subject but now acting their previous self, other times with an entirely different person in that scene. 

I appreciate that because I’ve always felt a guilt or disconnect with how I photograph people as an outsider, even if I spark up a lovely conversation and we try to get to know each other we are still outsiders to each other if we have just met. Coming from South Africa and seeing this happen quite a bit with, a lot of the time, a white photographer taking images of South Africans into Europe or the UK, especially when the work is a comment on the specifics of that person in the image - well, that unsettles me. So Starkey’s approach to creating art and capturing the world she sees around her is reverent and respectful to a degree that I would love to share within my own practice.