Lydia Goldblatt is hosting a kickstater to finance her project Fugue, to be produced as a book with renowned publisher GOST Books.
Lydia Goldblatt is an award-winning photographer based in London, UK. She is concerned with female identities and is interested in the ways personal experience informs collective understanding. Her works creatively fuse the approaches of both documentary and constructed photography. Lydia’s work is held in public collections including the V&A Museum National Art Library and National Portrait Gallery, and has been widely exhibited. Lydia’s portrait ‘Eden’ from Fugue won an award in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize. Clients include the Guardian, Financial Times, the Sunday Times, Telegraph, and *Wallpaper.
Lydia currently holds a kickstarter to finance her book, In Lydia’s words:
This is a story about love and grief; about mothering and losing a mother, intimacy and distance, told through photographs and writing.
My work centres on the meeting point between personal experience and universal themes, and explores identity, home and belonging. My first book, Still Here, was about the landscape of love and loss generated by my father’s death. The cultural silence around these emotions, the difficulty of navigating and giving voice to them, has made me want to suffuse them with colour and light.
But when I became a mother, I found myself unable to make pictures. Somehow it was so much that it was too much. After my mother died, I began to photograph again, at home and in the city around me. It felt a bit like the immersion of new motherhood, as I began to explore the experience of loss, grief and love – both the light and the dark, the negative and the positive. Perhaps because it is so difficult to explain, I wanted to be honest about what I was struggling with, about the feelings of claustrophobia and rage, as much as intimacy and love. These are feelings so often hidden by mothers, so often silenced as unacceptable. I also began writing, an evolving strand in my work. My notes and research became the basis for the text that flows through the project.
After receiving an artist commission from the national arts organisation GRAIN, I was able to build on these early photographs and notes. I work on medium format film to make the pictures, so the process was blind – I didn’t see what I was making for many months. The unknown of this felt right, like the intangibility of grief and love. Photographing became a lifeline, a way of weaving past through present. Through my pictures and writing, I was able to think about the transformations that accompany motherhood and loss. And I could challenge the archetypes and taboos of motherhood. Beyond mothering, I have been able to explore a wider sense of caregiving through the relationships my partner hold with our children, those they hold with each other, and through the writing that spans generations. I hope that this work gives voice to a story that is both individual and collective, and that perhaps you will hear an echo in it of your own story.
Because Fugue links to the history of family storytelling, I always imagined it as a book, something precious that you can hold. I am very fortunate and excited to now have the opportunity to produce this book, working in partnership with GOST Books. GOST design and publish some of the world’s foremost photography books, working alongside outstanding photographers.
The book will be launched with a solo show at Photo London 2024, Somerset House, with Robert Morat Galerie.
