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The Guardian
21-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
‘She knows she will forget': Grief, dementia and motherhood
Photographer Katherine Hubbard uses performance and domestic architecture to explore grief, motherhood, queerness and the labour of caregiving. Using large-format cameras and experimental darkroom techniques, The Great Room is a profoundly personal series by the interdisciplinary artist in collaboration with her mother. The Great Room can be purchased from Loose Joints publishers In 2020 – a year defined by introspection, caretaking and the upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic – Hubbard's mother began experiencing severe memory loss, later diagnosed as LATE, a brain disease mimicking the symptoms of Alzheimer's This is the first time Hubbard has consistently photographed another person. Here, photography becomes more than documentation. It is an entanglement of touch and gesture, the domestic and the maternal which confront the pain of losing the familiar essence of her mother While cleaning out the property, Hubbard discovered a pile of mirrored closet doors among her mother's collection of architectural salvage. Assembled into freestanding sculptures on wheels, these mobile mirrors moved through the now emptied home. Hubbard staged a series of photographs that fracture, multiply and obscure the space and its inhabitants In collaboration with her mother, Hubbard transforms her family home – a space overwhelming and deeply familiar – into a psychological landscape. These cluttered rooms become a layered stage where her mother serves as partner in an ongoing exploration of the real and performed Together, they create photographs that engage with daily rituals such as bathing, organising, and watching TV: compositions that blend seamlessly with unguarded intimacy. This photographic series ruptures the quotidian in an exploration of care work, memory, grief and the entropy of loss Hubbard's practice pushes against the flattening of the photographic image, critically engaging performance, sculptural elements and the implicit power dynamics in the social contract between the photographer and her subject Hubbard also creates experimental body-contact prints in the darkroom with her mother that trace the textures of skin and the physicality of aging. These tactile works materialise ability and the weight of time, celebrating the complexity of their relationship while questioning the roles of artist, subject and collaborator. In The Great Room, Hubbard reimagines the home as a space where photography transforms care and the slow grief of dementia into a powerful act of presence and love Katherine Hubbard: 'My mom sits on the bed looking at the pile on the floor and sighs. She is overwhelmed by the pile, but the pile only continues to grow with bills and letters and notes she writes to herself about the bills, and notes about the things she wants to remember to tell me or notes about the things she wants to remember herself but knows she will forget' ''So, we're selling the house, right?', 'Yes, Mom, we're selling the house.' How do you apply tense to a person who is in the process of becoming someone new? Aren't we all in the process of becoming someone new all the time? Shedding, right? We're all shedding, and isn't it wonderful?' 'You might like to know that, when I think of you and see you, it is as the whole person I have known you to be, bringing with you every single past experience, and that this turning inside out – this change – is no different, but it is accelerated and, as opposed to other years that felt additive, this time is stripping you back' 'You're cashing in your neurotic and self-defensive poker chips that you've hoarded over many years – reluctantly at first, but now more willingly'
The Guardian
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The big picture: Hicham Benohoud frames the classroom as theatre
No doubt you can sympathise with at least one of the pupils in the image. She has her head down, working hard, so bowed in thought her face is almost pressed right against her paper. A few seats down, a boy adopts a similar pose. One girl has her ankles crossed, while another has hers splayed. Across the room, one girl's shoes are practical, while another's are oddly adult, sandals with heels, hand-me-downs, maybe. You remember how imagination allowed you to disappear, to escape, to take leave of the four walls of the classroom, of the uncomfortable wooden chair and desk at which you tried not to fidget. Or were you the boy breaking the peace, wild and unruly, hanging over a table while lying flat on your stomach, legs dangling, fixing us with your cheeky gaze, as in this image from the Moroccan photographer Hicham Benohoud's book The Classroom? The images were taken between 1994 and 2000 while Benohoud worked as an art teacher and found himself, like the students, stifled by the educational system. The teacher who inspires by introducing simple freedoms into a rigid educational setting is a familiar cinematic trope (To Sir, With Love, Dangerous Minds, Entre les Murs, AKA The Class). Benohoud makes it his own in quiet black-and-white photographs that show how students, when given the opportunity to play and experiment, can redefine their surroundings with the leanest of creative means. Chairs and tables become frames within frames, reveal and conceal faces, as do paper cutouts held up playfully. Strings and tape, cardboard and fabric become interventions in space or extensions of the body, curtains and shrouds, places to hide, to refuse to be seen. Benohoud's project and its emphasis on youthful self-authorship is as much about the present as the past, with how traditional curriculum meets ever-evolving post-colonial identity. 'As soon as I took my camera out, their faces would light up. 'What's he going to get us to do now?' I could feel their gaze on me: we had a real understanding,' the photographer has said of the new energy in the room. These images are portraiture as pedagogy, a reminder that how we see ourselves and others, see and are seen, frame and are framed, makes the world around us visible in myriad shapes and forms – like all the best educations should. The Classroom is published by Loose Joints (£42)
