People find Hannah Starkey's photographs intriguing because, in depicting people in everyday situations, they are almost completely ordinary. Almost, but not quite. On the face of it, she straightforwardly records moments of work-a-day reality. But the closer you look at one of the 13 large-scale images that make up her exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the more you notice odd details: that the world they describe has an enhanced, hyper-real clarity, that the people, who are always female, seem unnaturally poised, in a slightly theatrical way. And she sometimes gives a very slightly surreal twist to things. One of her more offbeat photographs, for example, Butterfly Catch- ers, depicts two adolescents, one incongruously carrying a butterfly net, crossing a rubble-strewn urban wasteland in Belfast.
The scene is beautifully lit and could for all the world be the result of a chance encounter. Or could it? On reflection, it is clearly implausible that they would be hunting butterflies in this context, or that the photographer has just happened by. The fact that the girls are artfully arranged against the emblematic landscape, and the sheer visual quality of the image suggests a more considered approach than a chance snapshot. In fact, there is nothing left to chance. This realisation changes our attitude to the image significantly.
The adolescents are more like characters in a drama than strangers glimpsed in passing. We start to ask what it means, what the notion of butterfly hunting in the circumstances might symbolise. As it happens, those are the right sort of questions to ask, because Starkey's photographs are, she says, "modern allegories" that "replace traditional religious narrations with spiritualism and mysticism".
There is also a wistful, meditative quality to the photographs that might relate to her description of them as being about real, imagined and longed-for memories. About, that is, the way we enshrine moments of private significance in memory. It is striking that, though her characters are often immersed in their own thoughts, we are never granted access to them. We must interpret them on the basis of a wealth of external detail.
Starkey was born in Belfast. She studied photography and film at Napier University in Edinburgh and went on to complete an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art in London, where she now lives. She only completed her studies in 1997, but since then has already picked up a clutch of awards and commissions, including the John Kobal Portrait Award, an award at the 3rd Tokyo Photo Bienalle, an assignment for Vogue Hommes and a commission to make a piece for the new Tate Modern. She has also exhibited widely in Britain and Europe and - an essential imprimatur for a young artist in Britain - is included in the Saatchi collection.
Her work is part of a phenomenal boom in photography, as younger artists and photographers exploit the extraordinary possibilities of the medium with a renewed sense of freedom.
In her pictorial re-enactments of the ordinary, she follows on from figures like the influential Canadian Jeff Wall, who has shown previously at IMMA. As the distinguished photographic critic Val Williams comments: "Her recurring theme is that of women in the city." Actresses are recruited to stage work-a-day events and encounters, partly based on memory. As she puts it, her concern is to "explore women's lives through our daily rituals".
She is also quoted as remarking that she concentrates on women because they "are just more interesting to look at". She zeroes in on moments that are "seemingly insignificant or banal," moments "often not noticed within the framework of our routine lives" - such as teenage girls relaxing on a sofa, or browsing in a video store, lost in their own worlds, or a young woman sitting alone in a cafe.
These apparently non-descript subjects are monumentalised in her compositions, in which figures have a sense of almost heroic presence.
She is not exaggerating when she says her work is not at all elitist. She depicts everywomen in an immediately recognisable urban environment, as opposed to, for example, Sam Taylor-Wood, who uses an elaborate photographic tableaux. Taylor-Wood's subjects, whatever the independent merits of her work, never quite lose the sense of being privileged poseurs in trendy interiors. In their matter-of-fact way, Starkey's photographs manage to cast women as central characters in celebrations of their own lives, without the slightest hint of the feel-good mawkishness or special pleading that such a description might suggest.
Hannah Starkey: Photographs is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham, until August 27th (admission free). The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by Val Williams (£5)
