Untitled - September 2008

‘Mirror reflections for me are a really good analogy for my photography,’ says Hannah Starkey, ‘because they picture the interior and exterior on one plane.’ Untitled – September 2008 pictures this duality: screened behind a glass bead curtain and a window that reflects the street outside, a young woman sits alone in an empty restaurant. Another window behind her is similarly curtained, the view outside refracted and fractured. What is the woman seeing? Can she see us? Starkey’s work is often described as ‘staged’ photography: she imbues everyday scenes with a stylised, cinematic quality, heightened by a keen eye for composition. Her attention often falls on the subtle interplay of private reflection and social interaction in an urban setting, with a particular emphasis on female experience. Taking on the investigative mode of a flâneuse, the artist’s lens reveals moments of dissociation and alienation that might otherwise lie unseen: the woman is transfixed, perhaps by the view through the window, or by her own reflection, or perhaps lost in her own interior world. The window at once reveals and obscures, like a mirror – ‘the only way we see ourselves in the world outside lens based media.’ This multi-layered vision is typical of the optical complexities that accompany Starkey’s pensive subjects. ‘I prefer the term “constructed photograph”,’ Starkey says, ‘because it describes the reconstruction of the real as an act of redefining the real to reveal a psychological truth.’