Aperture’s excellent On Feminism issue includes a beautiful portfolio of images by the British photographer Hannah Starkey, for which I’ve written a short introduction.
Hannah Starkey combines banal, everyday moments of existence with highly stylized, constructed scenes in this series. Although the images appear at first glance to be social documentary images of woman going about their everyday lives they are instead carefully reconstructed scenes and the women in the images are actors. Because of this the images have a filmic quality about them and suggest a narrative – in a similar way to Cindy Sherman’s ‘Film Stills.’ Again similar to Sherman the work is not titled and is categorised by a rough estimate of date/time of the shot – giving the viewer these ambiguous details it begins to reference the vagueness of memory and how we do not recall the details of these fleeting moments. By recreating the banal, regular routines in everyday life Starkey elevates them and gives them a sense of importance by inviting the viewer to study the images. This merging of the everyday and the constructed image blurs the lines between fiction and reality – each one of these scenes appear to be something the viewer can relate to yet something about them is slightly off. To me the images appear almost candid, yet not quite and the positioning of the actors almost references dolls.
These scenes all take place in urban environments however the location in each one is every different. The situations are fleeting moments, pauses – the kind of activities undertaken when one has time to kill. These generic moments such as browsing a record store or in a café appear almost deadpan and melancholic as the subject is simply waiting for time to pass. Often the subject will be alone or isolated and there is no direct interactions with others, this creates a meditative feel to the images. The work looks at the physical and psychological connections between the individual and her surroundings mainly through the use of mirrors and reflections which is an ongoing theme in Starkey’s work. The reflection’s represent a sense of how we see ourselves and offer an abstraction within the composition. Smoke is also a running theme throughout this work, in an interview Starkey stated that the smoke represents a sense of the fluidity and the escapist quality of these ‘in-between’ moments she is photographing – again similar conations surround the wind and condensation used throughout the work Through the use of different models and locations Starkey has managed to address issues of class and race throughout the series.
