About

Nancy Honey’s personal work is just that – personal. Made over nearly 40 years, her images draw on her own experiences to consider topics such as motherhood, sexuality, power, and ageing. But though they’re framed by her biography, her projects look outwards, depicting and recording everyone from schoolgirls to businesswomen, infants to the elderly, models and bus passengers. As such they create a consistent body of work that’s asked a single question from many different angles – what does it mean to be a woman, now, in this particular time and place?

Born in America in 1948, Honey began her career as a young mother in Britain, outside her home country, outside society’s usual centres of power, and inside a male-dominated industry. Despite this she succeeded, building a career as a photographer and educator, and making personal work throughout. Take her first project, Us, shot in Bath from 1985-87. Made while she was studying photography and looking after her young children, it disrupts and disturbs the tradition of traditional family photographs to transcend the personal. Us went on to be exhibited in solo shows nationwide, including F Stop Gallery in Bath, and in several group shows including London's Institute of Contemporary Arts and Cardiff's Ffotogallery.

Woman to Woman (1990) saw Honey driven by curiosity about her own sexuality, and the ways it might – and might not – tie in with the representations of femininity in society. Working in colour, she photographed women of all ages plus found images which display a raw sexuality; Woman to Woman was published by Hexagon Editions in 1990, and toured the UK and Ireland as a solo show for two years. Apple of My Eye (1991) was inspired by her daughter's adolescence, and in particular the fact she would soon have breasts. How to explain the implications of her bust, from sexualisation in mass culture to idealisation in fine art? Honey turned to photography to help.

The transformation from girl to woman also underpinned Entering the Masquerade (1992), which was supported by a Fellowship from the National Museum of Photography, Film and TV, and four schools in Bath and Yorkshire. Showing 11-14-year-old girls, it mixes documentary shots with images in which they were invited to present their fantasy selves – and in which many opted to look older and more glamorous. Entering the Masquerade was exhibited and published as a book by the National Museum of Photography, Film and TV in 1992, and portions of it exhibited internationally.

Fantasy and imagination also inspired Citybus (1993), a public art project in which Southampton City Council supported Honey as she shot people on local buses. Honey’s proposal focused on “imagining the lives of fellow passengers, looking out of the windows & daydreaming”; once working she found there was “no place to hide” and was thrust into something more akin to street photography. The passengers tended to be elderly, young, or female, the project giving a view of a slice of life away from the circles of power. Images from the project were displayed in the local Citybuses and the project was exhibited and published internationally.

Honey was by now in middle age, and in Old Enough to Know Better (1994) she considered older women and their relationships with men. It’s an insight into the women’s lives, and an account of how their personal narratives intertwined with wider society; Honey recorded her conversations, marking a transition in which she felt she must give her subjects a voice. She also photographed the women and their family albums. Presented on cutting-edge CD-ROM technology, Old Enough to Know Better was shown at Cambridge Darkroom, Saatchi & Saatchi, London, and as part of the Fotofeis festival at Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Scotland, and can now be viewed online.

By the mid-1990s Honey was a successful editorial and commercial photographer, shooting for well-respected clients such as the NSPCC, Hermes, Time, New Yorker, and Marie Claire, and she also taught on BA courses across the UK for 25 years. But she continued to shoot personal work, photographing her daughter from 1980-2010, and creating four fashion stories which embraced a diversity of ages and ethnic backgrounds long before it was trendy to do so. Hair Salon was published in Tank Magazine, London, in 2001; Mad Tea was commissioned by Dealer Deluxe Magazine, Paris, in 2004; and Poodle Parlour was selected to be published as a Nazraeli One Picture Book in 2008.

Curious about women of her generation, Honey next decided to photograph 100 women over the age of 55 who had “defied gender stereotypes” to become leaders – including world-renown academics, writers, politicians, artists and scientists such as Germaine Greer, Antonia Fraser, and Tessa Jowell. Shot over two years, 100 Leading Ladies, was published as a book by Dewi Lewis Media and launched at the 2014 exhibition at Somerset House, and toured for two years across the UK. Each portrait is accompanied by an interview with the sitter, giving an insight into the structures which helped, or hindered, these women’s progress.

The personal, in so many cases, was the political, with traditional domestic requirements seemingly threatening to pull them away from public success. So for her last project to date Honey looked at Stay at Home Dads, photographing and interviewing 13 families in which the father (or one of the fathers) had primary responsibility for the kids, and presenting a deliberately positive view of these quiet revolutionaries.

And if the Stay at Home Dads are quiet revolutionaries, so too is Honey. Often working with cutting-edge technology but always working, she carved out a career in a male-dominated industry with projects directly engaging with the experience of being a woman. Now the lack of diversity in photography and the position of women in our society is once again being considered; over the last 40 years, Nancy Honey has already walked the walk as a retrospective look over her 40-year career shows.