‘We got naked and covered ourselves in Vaseline’: Katherine Hubbard on photographing her ailing mother — SkimNews
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- Katherine Hubbard photographed her mother Antonette Berger at her Germantown, Philadelphia apartment over five years after Berger was diagnosed with LATE, a condition causing dementia-like symptoms with slower memory and functioning decline
- The Great Room series — named for Berger's description of her apartment's main living space — was published as a book titled "One Fifty One" after the house's street number, and is included in Hubbard's solo exhibition at Studio Voltaire, London running 7 October to 10 January 2027
- Hubbard set up two vintage Polaroid cameras at her mother's apartment and left the equipment there for the full five-year span, with mirrors becoming a central motif so she could project her own presence into the frame and shift the camera's authority dynamics
- Hubbard and Berger made 4x8 ft body prints together in the darkroom — Hubbard says they stripped, covered themselves in Vaseline (which Berger hated), and used their bodies as printing tools on silver gelatin photo paper in what Hubbard calls a "choreographed" private performance
- Hubbard explicitly grapples with photographing someone with dementia, stating she does not view Berger as a collaborator and weighing her mother's willingness against respecting her known limits — though Berger, Hubbard says, derived "a huge amount of strength and sense of value" from participating
- Berger owned and rented out the sprawling, dilapidated Germantown building at 151 for 40 years; Hubbard inherited its management — including squirrels and raccoons in the walls and broken basement pumps — while also packing up the apartment for Berger's move to a care facility
Why it matters: Hubbard's five-year project puts a lesser-known dementia diagnosis — LATE, frequently misidentified as Alzheimer's — in front of London audiences via Studio Voltaire, while also foregrounding the consent complications of photographing a parent with declining cognition. The Vaseline body prints mark an unusually physical approach to documenting caregiving, with Hubbard openly describing anger, frustration, and love alongside the artistic output.
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