“Right from the very beginning, I wanted to examine how it feels, to explain what it is to be a woman,” says Nancy Honey. As a recent exhibition of her works at London bookshops Claire de Rouen’s new Shoreditch space comes to an end, it’s a fitting time for the American-born, London-based artist to look back on her career. “I’m 78 years old now, which is mind-blowing, and I just think, ‘how did I get here so fast, and what does it mean to look back?’”

The exhibition, specifically curated for Claire de Rouen by the shop’s new co-director Dominic Bell, draws upon Honey’s many photographic series, all of which share a similarly hopeful perspective on womanhood. She says, “It’s a freeing up of a space of female experience, and I hope it shows a certain sense of enjoyment.” That joyous quality runs throughout Honey’s work, which documents women’s experiences at various stages of life: series such as Entering the Masquerade (1992) and A Daughter's View (1991), for example, capture the transition from childhood to adulthood with tenderness, rich colours and a kind of hazy, nostalgic glow. There is joy in these images, but Honey doesn't shy away from capturing the anxieties of adolescence too: some of her subjects are laughing and goofing around; others appear bored, pensive or even disgusted. 

“I always wanted to make work that was not didactic, but that explains what it feels like to be a woman. [I didn't want to be] negative and not be hard-hitting – especially during a time when other photographers were,” Honey explains. The result is a body of work that explores changing female lives with a sense of curiosity, at times bodily estrangement (one shot from Entering the Masquerade shows a girl in a classroom frowning as she peers, lifts up her shirt and peers down at her own body), and, at its very centre, the notion of playfulness. Clothes, makeup, and shoes become a dress rehearsal for adulthood, and we see young women flicker between states of play and solemnity.

A similar in-betweenness is present in Honey’s close-ups, too, which often capture the softness of a young girl’s face beginning to give way to the more pronounced bone structure of an adult. “As a photographer of women, I am deeply fascinated by how our faces change so quickly,” Honey explains. “You see a teenage or childlike face, and then you see them maybe a year or two later, and think, ‘Oh my God, they look so different!’”

As the artist recalls, she has at times received criticism for portraying womanhood and femininity with such a light touch, with some critics suggesting that her work lacks gravitas. “I remember I was showing the work as a slide presentation and one woman just either shouted out or put up her hand and said, 'Don't you think this is very marshmallowy?’” But while she may imbue her work with humour and warmth, that does not mean she ignores larger, more serious concerns of the female body as a commodity in a patriarchal and capitalist society. “One of my big questions is: what would it be like if we as women were ruling the world? And why is it that a picture of a beautiful young lady, teenager or early 20s, is always there to sell something? What do we do about that? Do we censor ourselves, or do we just say, ‘What the hell?’”

Honey’s images possess both a what-the-hell attitude and an insistence that, despite the difficulties, existing in a female body can at least sometimes be experienced and documented with a certain lightness. As she puts it, “Even though I feel like I have a lot of joie de vivre, I still think I’m talking about serious things. Joy is serious.”

Claire de Rouen’s new shop is now open at 11A Kingsland Road, London and their outstanding cultural programming continues with more exhibitions planned to celebrate 2026, their 20th anniversary year.