Photographer Hannah Starkey: my work is asking women, How’s it going?

By depicting real women in real spaces through constructed and filtered images, Starkey’s work connects powerfully with today’s ideas of modern femininity

Hannah Starkey has been training her camera on everyday women for 25 years. Her photographs include dreaming girls, protesters and strident single mums. Whatever they are doing, they have a briefly glimpsed radiance that seems to set their whole environment aglow. These are works that quietly eulogise women and how they inhabit public space, so in the wake of #MeToo and debates about women’s safety, it seems a particularly apt moment for the Hepworth Wakefield to stage a survey. “One thing I’ve realised is that those questions are always pertinent,” says Starkey. “They get pushed back, and then a critical mass comes up again. Women are really tenacious.”

Although Starkey’s style resembles street photography, she doesn’t work on the hoof, capturing women going about their lives. While her images might originate in something she has seen, the works hover between documentary and fiction. The apparent fleeting moments are crafted, with locations and props carefully chosen. The women include friends and people she approaches on the street.

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