Katherine Hubbard

How does one capture the inner experience of a person whose reality is increasingly detached from the outside world? And how does one maintain a relationship with someone deeply familiar yet irreversibly changing?

Katherine Hubbard began her five-year project The Great Room in 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, as her mother Antonette Berger’s condition progressively worsened and the artist became her primary caregiver. Several months of anxiety and isolation passed until Berger was diagnosed with LATE (limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy), a form of dementia. Hubbard describes this diagnosis as both necessary and insufficient: a gesture of control and classification that ultimately fails to grasp the lived, constantly shifting reality of her mother. It is precisely in this discrepancy that the project is situated.

At its core is Berger’s apartment on the first floor of a Victorian house she owned for over forty years, which becomes the stage for a series of photographic encounters. The images emerge from various rituals, documenting a relationship and interactions in which grief and tenderness, disorientation and great intimacy are intertwined. Here, the camera is not merely a recording device but has a structuring presence—it creates pauses in the routines of care, time not dictated by immediate necessities, and simultaneously becomes a witness to small performances.

The Great Room marks a significant shift in Hubbard’s practice; the project brought about a close intertwining of her identities as an artist and as a daughter. Having largely avoided photographing people in her work before, she now turns to the most personal of subjects. Nevertheless, her long-standing critical engagement with modes of representation and the power structures inherent in photography remains unmistakable. In many images, Hubbard includes herself—often with tripod and camera—thereby emphasizing the apparatus’s presence and the specificity of her own position. This gesture resists the fiction of an invisible observer. It makes the act of imaging transparent, but is also ethically readable: as a refusal to leave her mother alone in the image. As the artist describes in her interview with Bettina Spörr in the accompanying publication:

“I have a great need to protect my mother. I never wanted people to look at a picture of my mother and make the mistake of taking my place in their minds, just because they see her from a vantage point where I had previously stood with my camera. I instinctively positioned myself so that I am visible in the photos through the mirrors hung in the house.”

In some cases, Berger herself presses the shutter button. This subtle shift undermines the conventional subject-object relationship in photography. The image becomes a place where agency is not removed but redistributed. Berger appears, despite the stigmatization associated with aging and cognitive decline, as an active participant. Or in the words of the artist:

“As a counter-narrative, I wanted to take photos where my mother is recognizably the photographer. I wanted to give her all the power that belongs to the person operating the camera. This fictional story of Antonette the photographer runs through the entire project; its meaning is essentially, above all, to command respect for my mother.”

On a formal level, the photographs are characterized by instability, by oblique angles, fragmentary perspectives, and kaleidoscopic reflections in mirrors. These visual strategies not only illustrate confusion or disorientation. Rather, they break open the authority of a singular and stable viewpoint. The mirror in this context is more than just a symbol of self-perception or mortality; it foregrounds seeing itself as a contingent and mediated act. Images multiply and overlap, resisting any closure, to indicate that perceptions, like memories, are always in flux.

Hubbard continues this exploration in her cameraless works. In several darkroom sessions, she and her mother created contact prints. They applied Vaseline, which acted as a chemical barrier during the subsequent development process, and pressed their bodies directly onto the photographic paper. The resulting works are immediate and life-size traces of physical presence. They translate touch into image, dissolving the distance between body and representation. The process itself—conscious, physically strenuous, almost choreographic—highlights the body as a tool of inscription rather than as that which is to be depicted. In this way, intimacy is not merely represented but materially enacted.

The Great Room refers to the largest and once most prestigious room in the apartment. Its former splendor has faded, its surfaces marked by the passage of time and lack of maintenance. Berger divided the room with a provisional wall into her sleeping area and a space that served as a storage room—a place where objects and unresolved matters accumulated. The “greatness” of the room is thus as much a memory as a fiction, pointing to a discrepancy between past and present, appearance and lived reality.

This motif of separation also appears in the exhibition. Partition walls, on which the photographs are also hung, structure the gallery in a way that echoes the apartment's floor plan. Here, architecture serves not only to present the works but also to continue their logic. What emerges is not a definitive portrait but a changing constellation: a house, a life, and a relationship in flux—held together, albeit precariously, by acts of seeing, touching, and being together.