Hannah Starkey’s *Photographs 1997–2017*, published by MACK in 2018, gathers two decades of work devoted to women and to the ways photography helps shape ideas of femininity. The book moves from staged photographs made in Belfast to Starkey’s documentation of the 2017 Women’s March in London, presenting a sustained inquiry rather than a single period or method. Across these works, women appear in urban settings and familiar social situations, often caught in moments of reflection, estrangement, attention, or exchange that conventional public imagery might overlook.

Starkey’s distinctive approach is cinematic without being confined to cinema. Her carefully constructed scenes draw on diaristic, street, documentary, fine-art, and fashion photography, while also recalling the compressed narratives of modern genre painting. The resulting images are at once recognisable and unsettled: they use familiar visual codes but redirect them toward the experience and agency of women. The figure of the flâneuse—an expressly female counterpart to the traditional male flâneur—offers a useful key to the book’s urban attentiveness, in which looking becomes both subject and method.

As a catalogue raisonné, the volume gives this body of work a chronological and conceptual breadth that individual photographs cannot provide. Its significance lies in the way it places Starkey’s image-making within a wider argument about representation and the female gaze, while preserving the ambiguity and emotional reserve of the photographs themselves. A biographical essay by curator and writer Charlotte Cotton, together with a conversation between Starkey and editor and writer Liz Jobey, extends that argument without displacing the images. For collectors, this is a considered record of an influential practice and a useful reference for understanding how staged observation, popular visual culture, and feminist photographic thinking meet in Starkey’s work.

Editorial notes: Based solely on the verified publisher description and metadata. The book is identified as a 184-page hardback published by MACK in 2018; no edition claim is made.