This fully illustrated publication accompanies Hannah Starkey’s first solo museum exhibition for 10 years and marks the transfer of her image making from film to digital photography.

It examines the development of a remarkable body of work by an artist who invites us to acknowledge the alienation and the redemption present in contemporary life.

The exhibition is curated by Diarmuid Costello of the University of Warwick’s Philosophy Department who, with Margaret Iversen, leads the AHRC funded research project, ‘Aesthetics after Photography’.

In her essay in the catalogue, Iversen notes, ‘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.

What all of these artists’ work has in common, however, is the evocation of the quintessentially cinematic emotions of desire, doubt or anxiety. This strand of photographic art is defined as much by a certain cinematic sensibility, as by the strategy of staging scenarios for the camera.’

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Hannah Starkey: Twenty-Nine Pictures at Mead Gallery, University of Warwick, January – March 2011.