Curriculum

“All my life I’ve been surrounded by strong women, yet this quality is largely uncelebrated in mainstream visual culture,” says Hannah Starkey, who was born in Belfast and grew up during the thirty-year conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. Since the mid-1990s, when she moved to London to study photography, Starkey has made portraits of isolated figures, usually women, in urban settings—standing alone on an illuminated dance floor, stopped on the street, sitting in a café. These subjects of Starkey’s cinematic images occupy ambiguous but psychologically