Hannah Starkey

Over the last three decades the award-winning artist Hannah Starkey has significantly contributed to the UK art scene and the evolution of the female gaze in photography. In 2019 she was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society, and in the same year received the Freelands Award, resulting in a major retrospective at The Hepworth, Wakefield in 2022/3. The works produced for that exhibition continued her career-long endeavour to depict the way women inhabit the world and spaces that shape their interactions.

The three works in the collection come from the first years of her professional practice and each captures women in different ways, alone at home, in a pair in transit, and in a group in public. The former two are from 1997, the same year she graduated from the RCA photography MA. Starkey's protagonists are mostly women, usually teenagers, caught in transitional moments and spaces, she has said of her practice and approach “All my work is basically asking women, ‘How’s it going?’”