Fugue
Lydia Goldblatt’s Fugue offers an honest portrayal of motherhood, highlighting both its challenges and the joyful moments that shape the experience. Her work seamlessly blends documentary and staged photography, creating a narrative about the cycle of life, where love and pain coexist. The artistic endeavor is deeply intertwined with her personal experiences and is often influenced by her two daughters, becoming an integral part of the narrative.
In this interview, we discuss Lydia’s exhibition Fugue, which is currently on display at the Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin. We begin our conversation by exploring her formative years at university and her growing interest in photography during her BA studies. Lydia shares how the experience of motherhood, coupled with the loss of her own mother, has shaped her approach to photography and themes that became prominent in her work.
She explains, “I began photographing a lot more at home and in the streets and area around me, thinking in a more focused way on this conjunction in my life of loss and abundance, intimacy and distance, shifting identities and roles.” We also talk about the careful curation for the exhibition, in which she collaborated with Chris Littlewood and Robert Morat, aiming to create a space that resonates with the emotional journey presented in the book.
Lydia Goldblatt is a London-based artist and photographer with an MA in photography from the University of the Arts London and a BA in French and Italian studies from the University College London (UCL). Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the National Portrait Gallery, London; Felix Nussbaum Museum, Germany; and the GoEun Museum of Photography, South Korea. She published two photo books: Fugue (2024) with GOST Books and Still Here (2014) with Hatje Cantz.
Photography by Lydia Goldblatt Curated by Christopher Littlewood Exhibited at Robert Morat Galerie GOST Books GRAIN Artful Dodgers Imaging Brider & Bull
‘I had begun to get more involved with photography while I was at university studying languages and literature and spent a lot of time assisting other photographers before slowly building up some experience as a commissioned photographer myself.’
Exhibition
Hi Lydia, thank you for this opportunity to speak with you about your work, and congratulations on the new exhibition to take place in Robert’s Berlin Gallery! I would love to start with your story and what led you to study Master’s in Photography and select this as your career. Could you take us a little bit back in time?
Hi Nastasia, thank you so much for inviting me to speak with you for WÜL Magazine and your kind words on the exhibition of Fugue currently at Robert Morat Galerie.
To go back a bit in time: I had begun to get more involved with photography while I was at university studying languages and literature and spent a lot of time assisting other photographers before slowly building up some experience as a commissioned photographer myself. Returning to university, after some years to study for a Master’s degree in photography, gave me my first opportunity to exclusively focus on my own ideas, themes, and practice and spend two years developing my first real piece of work, a project about adolescence called Keeping Time. It was a deeply formative period of development for me, both in terms of being able to devote time to my own research and the development of my practice and to be able to learn from all the rich conversations and practices of my peers and tutors.
‘The day we gathered to scatter my mother’s ashes felt like one I had to give testament to, and I took my camera with me.’
Motherhood
I want to explore the concept of photography through the experience of motherhood. You were speaking in several interviews about the juxtaposition of the trauma of losing your mother while becoming a mother to two daughters. Those are very intense experiences, also something people go through for the first time in their lives, in a way, alone. What was unique about this moment that made you take the camera again and start the research, documenting your experiences and researching your new and developing identity?
As a maker, I am lucky that I have a set of tools available to me to think through the emotions and experiences of life — in my case, usually photography and, more recently, writing. During the time when I became a mother, and my own mother became increasingly frail, I wasn’t really able to access those tools. Making work also often involves an element of stepping back to look more closely, and I didn’t want any form of stepping away or mediation between myself and these very visceral experiences at the time. I read, voraciously, trying to find echoes of my own experience in others’, and I talked with the community around me — so of course, the ‘research,’ if that is the word, never stopped. There was a point, though, where things began to shift.
You refer to it as a moment, and perhaps that day did mark a kind of moment. The day we gathered to scatter my mother’s ashes felt like one I had to give testament to, and I took my camera with me. Although most of those photographs are not in the final project (there is one), it helped to bring me back to the possibility of photographing again. From then, I began photographing a lot more at home and in the streets and area around me, thinking in a more focused way on this conjunction in my life of loss and abundance, intimacy and distance, shifting identities and roles. Shortly afterwards, the first lockdown happened, and the world went through a monumental metamorphosis, each living in our personal spheres, small worlds becoming something bigger. My own sense of loss, personal grief, and coming to terms with being a mother myself was suddenly set within a much wider context of staggering loss and change.
‘Often, ideas for images might be sparked by conversations we have, things they say, or their play — which feeds into the ideas I am thinking about.’
Mother — Daughter Relationship
We see both of your daughters appear in your projects through immense care, tenderness, and also your curiosity about them, their lives and their experiences during this period. The viewer can see life and the promise it holds to the new generation through the prism of the mother figure, larger than life, always there to comfort and offer abundant love. If we go behind the camera and the relationship you form with your daughters as a mother but also as an artist and a photographer, how do you work with them while making the images? Or what is the distinction in the perception of your daughters from the perspective of a mother and the one of an artist in terms of things you learn about them through your camera?
I think, as time has gone on, I have learnt to see so much of their own developing relationships in the photographs I have made — which when they were tiny was not so clear. Because the work was made over four years, they developed in ways that I could not imagine, and their relationships with each other, with their father, as well as with me, began to come through in the work. I see that looking back over it, how much the work has changed because they have changed. They bring — of course — so much to it. Often, ideas for images might be sparked by conversations we have, things they say, or their play — which feeds into the ideas I am thinking about. For example, the photograph called Bone, of my daughter with an animal’s bone resting on her face, through which she looks back at me — that began from my daughter finding and picking up this bone, it becoming her treasure, her fascination. So her fascination with it fuelled my fascination, and it became a very symbolic object for me too. The image itself holds that fascination and becomes so much about vulnerability and love, awareness of mortality and letting go — and the gaze back and forth between mother and daughter with that awareness as central.
‘The work itself holds a number of different and repeating emotional resonances — both light and dark — and the challenge of the exhibition was to find the right balance of this.’
Themes
I remember you speaking about symbolism in each image, which is present in the smallest details carefully added to the frame during your conversation with Richard West from Source Photographic Review. This can materialize in an object that carries a special meaning only you know about or a situation that happened just before the release of the shutter that informs the narrative captured that might also be unavailable to the viewer. When working on an exhibition, what is your approach to the details in creating the narrative through the decision on the images to be selected, the work with space, and the discussion with the gallerist?
Working on the exhibition with Robert Morat, in which I have also worked closely with Chris Littlewood as curator, has been a dream. It is a very different process to editing the work for a book, and you need to shift from the page to a three-dimensional space, and to holding the narrative of the work in a much more condensed way. I was able to think that through with Robert and with Chris, in a very generous and sustained process of conversation. The selection of photographs began to work when we put together four key images that between them held the visual and emotional weight of the narrative, along with a succinct sense of flow. Once we had defined this, the rest went from there. The work itself holds a number of different and repeating emotional resonances — both light and dark — and the challenge of the exhibition was to find the right balance of this — to take the viewer physically through the emotional space of the work.
