The beloved photographer’s recent exhibition in Claire de Rouen brought together tender pictures of girlhood and womanhood from her vast archive
For over four decades, American-born photographer Nancy Honey has been making pictures exploring the experience of womanhood. Inspired by image-makers such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Nan Goldin, who have used their immediate environments and what they had at hand to create work of extraordinary imagination and empathy, Honey’s heartfelt portraits honour her chosen theme with tenderness, humour, beauty and dignity.
“I always wanted to be an artist all my life, I can’t remember anything else,” she says. Now 78, her route to photography was indirect – she trained in fine art as a painter during the height of flower power on the West Coast before tentatively experimenting with photography. “My ex-husband and I had lived together in San Francisco and made a little dark room in the cupboard under the stairs. I was working in black and white, just self-taught,” she recalls. After moving to the UK and settling in Bath with her young family, she enrolled in a visual communication course – the closest thing she could find to a photography class. “I had a one-year-old and a three-year-old, but I just thought, ‘Wow, I have to get my degree,’ because I knew by then I wanted to be a photographer.”
Honey was drawn to photography for its immediacy, as well as its ability to distil a passing moment. “Over the years, you learn all the things that you love about photography,” she explains. “I love the relationship it has with time. Almost every photographer I’ve ever met, when we look at our pictures, we can remember the exact time we took each one.” Over the ensuing decades she shot prolifically, creating numerous bodies of work and amassing a vast archive of pictures (and memories).
Her recent exhibition, which was on display at the newly opened Shoreditch site of legendary fashion and photography bookshop Claire de Rouen, pulled together images from across multiple bodies of work. Curated by the store’s new co-director Dominic Bell, it created a previously unseen configuration of her work and featured images from projects including Entering the Masquerade, a series of portraits of girls aged 11 to 14, and Woman to Woman, a project originally comprised of 22 triptychs about womanhood.
“The work is just so original, it’s photography at its best – it captures something we all know and can relate to,” says Bell. “Photography can be quite ageist, always on the lookout for the new and emerging. It’s important to highlight work that stands the test of time and resonates from the past. We all fell in love with photography through looking at photo albums of family and loved ones. Nancy’s archive is one of the most special things we’ve come across, endless beautiful hand-printed c-types and projects that haven’t yet seen the light of day. There aren’t many archives in the UK like it.”
Woman to Woman, perhaps one of her most defining and epic projects, was made from 1987 to 1990 and took Honey into a range of sites she associated with women’s lives. She says, “I knew at the beginning that I wanted to make a project explaining how it felt like to me to be a woman. I really didn’t know how to express that, but I knew that if I placed myself in places that had to do with being a woman, I would eventually find things, and that’s exactly what I did.” She travelled everywhere she could think that contributed to the matrix of female experience, from mother and toddler groups to the factory that made Marks & Spencer’s underwear.
In 66 pictures arranged as 22 triptychs, in many ways, it epitomises the sentiment of her approach to image-making and curation. Placing the images side-by-side assembles new meanings while also creating ambiguity. “For me, it was very personal. I wanted to make work always about being a woman – things that I’ve done, or even that I fear – but I didn’t want it to be didactic and hit people over the head, right? I just wanted to play with what happens when you put pictures next to each other, and then it really resonates with, say, some of your experience. If the three-in-a-row were ever a distinct narrative, I would always change it.”
While she no longer shoots, Honey is immersed in working on the “gigantic burden” of her archive, organising her work and forging new meanings in the abundance of photographs and memories – a kind of vast autobiography composed of images. “Like so many artists, we’re looking at things from an autobiographical point of view, whether we like it or not,” she says. “My aim has always been to have my work be deeply personal and, at the same time, universal.”
Claire de Rouen’s new shop is now open at 11A Kingsland Road, London. Their outstanding cultural programming continues with more exhibitions planned to celebrate their 20th anniversary year, and their collaboration and partnership with Alaïa has continued since 2024, when Pieter Mulier and Alaïa invited the Claire de Rouen team to open a second book shop at their New Bond Street store.
