Lydia Goldblatt describes her book Fugue as a “story about mothering and losing a mother, intimacy and distance, told through photographs and writing”. It is a companion volume, in some ways, to an earlier project, Still Here, about the unsettled, intense landscape of love and loss generated by her father’s death. “The cultural silence around these emotions,” Goldblatt writes, by way of introduction, “the difficulty of navigating and giving voice to them, has made me want to suffuse them with colour and light.”
The pictures in Fugue were made over four years, beginning in 2020. The world of some of them is circumscribed by lockdown, life narrowing to the bubble of family. The photographer’s young daughters are insistently present in the pictures, climbing and clinging and needing notice. “Abundant” is her word for them. Her mother is already an absence; the words in the book chart not only her loss but also the responsibility of clearing and decanting her London home.
Goldblatt and her partner, as here, seem to exist halfway between those two states; wearied by care and by reflection, not as corporeal as their children. When Goldblatt first became a mother, a few years earlier, she was suddenly unable to take pictures at all, caring was “so much that it was too much”. It was only when her mother died that she wanted to pick up a camera again, to find a visual language honest to “feelings of claustrophobia and rage as much as intimacy and love”. She worked on medium-format film, often waiting appropriate months for those images and those emotions to be processed. Fugue indicates both a brief snatch of musical harmony, and in psychiatry, a sudden loss of awareness of identity. Both meanings seem fitting for the forthcoming exhibition of Goldblatt’s pictures and the subsequent book.
Fugue is published by Gost (£45) in June. An exhibition of the photographs, with Robert Morat Galerie, will be on display at Photo London 2024, Somerset House, 16-19 May
