At the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, artist Katherine Hubbard started to sense something was not right with her mother, Antonette Berger. Berger was eventually diagnosed with LATE [limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy], a condition which causes symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s, though the decline in memory and day-to-day functioning is slower. The diagnosis was “a painful, drawn-out and confusing process – then a feeling of so much grief, so much loss”, Hubbard explains on Zoom from New York.
Finding herself suddenly in the role of a “caretaker under duress”, Hubbard decided to photograph her housebound mother and her environment. But I make images because of how they feel, not how they look.” She set up two vintage Polaroid cameras and her equipment at her mother’s apartment in Germantown, and didn’t take it down for five years. The wrenchingly beautiful images became the series The Great Room, published as a book, One Fifty One, named after the house’s street number.
The Great Room photographs and installations based on Berger’s apartment are included in Hubbard’s solo exhibition at Studio Voltaire, London. Hubbard grew up in Philadelphia, but in a different, “more modest” house than the incredible, maze-like, sprawling setting seen in The Great Room. The apartment that appears in the photographs belongs to a huge, dilapidated building Berger owned and rented out for 40 years. 151 formed an important part of Hubbard’s upbringing and early imaginary – they would regularly visit Berger’s many tenants there, “it was kind of like a community centre, there were always people around, complaining about things breaking”.
The title The Great Room references Berger’s own description of the apartment’s main living space. They completed daily domestic duties together there, and slowly began to pack up and empty out the apartment, so that Berger could move to a care facility. Some of the scenes are thrillingly theatrical: at one point, Hubbard created a stage for her mum with “a set of rotting 1960s mirror doors I found in the garage that I thought were stunning and built them on to stands, so she could roll them around.” Mirrors became an important feature in the images as “a way of never leaving my mum alone in the image, to project myself into the image.
If I’m in the image there with her, it changes some of the authority and power dynamics of the camera”. The reflections give a feeling of transition and loss, an image about to disappear – they hold their images in the same space, the way the photograph does, but sometimes give the sense that they are missing each other. It’s a quiet confrontation with the pain of brain disease, of disappearing while being.
Magnificent and bristling with tension, Berger often commands the image with authority in majestic light, framed by her grand and rambling home. We’d get naked and covered in Vaseline, and Then we’d use our bodies as a printing tool on to photo paper – like a performance in darkness, but it was very choreographed, a lot had to be around her safety getting her on to the floor and on to the paper, and back up again.” The main problem was that Berger “hates Vaseline – she found it suffocating. But when I’d ask her if she didn’t want to do it, she’d get offended and say ‘of course I’ll do it, are you stupid?
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