Book Description

Twenty-nine striking pictures by celebrated photographic artist Hannah Starkey have been brought together for her biggest solo show in a decade. The Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre is hosting the exhibition which runs until mid March 2011. The Belfast-born artist's work is notable for its day-to-day subject matter and cinematic studio staging. Her pictures depict women in carefully composed scenarios: slumped over a Coca Cola in a seedy pub, anguished in a waiting room, drunkenly passed out on the sofa. The cinematic mode of contemporary photography comprises a diverse range of practices and Starkey's near narrative photography is one particular type that needs to be differentiated from Cindy Sherman's mimicry of film production stills or Gregory Crewdson's elaborate staging of cinematic scenarios, Margaret Iversen, co-director of a research project called Aesthetics After Photography, said. What all of these artists' work has in common, however, is the evocation of the quintessentially cinematic emotions of desire, doubt or anxiety.