Wakefield is a place known for its friendliness. Hannah Starkey’s close personal involvement with the city began with a post-lockdown residency during which she produced photographs that intimately document the lives of local teenage girls in the city’s favorite spots. Wakey Tavern, 2022, an image emanating from the warmth and resilience of the working class, documents some of her relationships from this experience: four young women sit in a greasy spoon café, with a classic English pub – whose name is an affectionate reference to the city – closed, barricaded and visible through the window in the background. Cruising the streets of Wakefield on my way back from the exhibition, I found myself standing at the pictured location, trying to triangulate the view in real time and mulling over the rumored pub takeover by mega-chain Wetherspoons and the impact of Starkey’s activism in the city.
In contrast, the majority of Starkey’s staged portraits of women that she encountered in various locations in the UK depict her subjects engrossed in solitary pursuits. These images can be called documentary fiction, much like Bill Brandt’s, but with a third or fourth wave feminist twist. As with Brandt’s work, Starkey’s images include highly composed storylines, deftly emotive cinematic staging – a hybrid of street art and contemporary fine art photography that reconstructs everyday events to imply psychological truth rather than a photographic fact.
Untitled, May 1997 is most iconic in its feigned vulnerability. In a different cafe – like Edward Hopper, Starkey is drawn to such environments where people can be alone in public – a woman stares into a mirror, watched by her bewildered older counterpart, as a London bus flashes by . Operating both on the minor dramatic register of cinematographic photography and on the major register of narrative painting, this first image is typical of those that will follow. Taken over a period of twenty-five years, from when the Belfast-born artist moved to London, the images in the exhibition offer a personal view of a quarter-century of UK history. , from the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to the post-Brexit era. , as witnessed Untitled, May 2022, where a young woman rushes past sectarian murals in Northern Ireland. Tellingly, Starkey claims to have taken part in all women-related protests in the UK since 2018 after attending the previous year’s World Women’s March, which took place the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Starkey’s new activism is reflected in a significant shift in his work from self-absorbed theatrical self-reflection to protest, particularly around #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and the environmental crisis, all of which have been integrated as issues into the alongside broader gender equality. ‘Pussy power’, Women’s March, London 2017for example, uses bathos and humility to show strength, with a lone middle-aged woman standing confidently between two pink signs that read PUSSY POWER and WE SHALL OVER COMB.
Starkey’s feminist perspective on dominant political events and patriarchal constructs emerges through a portrayal of female introspection that avoids portraying women as insular and melancholy. Alongside the works’ fragmented historical narratives, which show individuals living their lives during global political moments, the images suggest an erosion of self or psyche related to the emotional impact of new technologies on young people, like those she photographed in Wakefield. An innate durability is evident, as in Untitled, March 2022, where a teenager makes up the face of a friend in the unstable reality of a room with infinite reflections. The girl looks back in our direction with tender defiance, breaking the fourth wall and resisting her confinement. Likewise, in Metavers, May 2022, another young woman stands with her eyes closed; surrounded by a crowd of docile seated counterparts wearing virtual reality headsets, her ecstatic position implies that she is in a state of reverie, imagining an alternate reality in the face of sublime external technological pressure. As I left the Wakey Tavern, I was struck by how the artist and his subjects exude an optimism that has not only helped make contemporary photography a psychologically charged medium, but has also transformed the power in life. real.
