The great room

In "The great room" Katherine Hubbard makes photographs and experimental darkroom prints with her mom, Antonette Berger who has a degenerative brain disease. Considering photography as care work, Hubbard has photographed Berger in her home since 2020.

Katherine Hubbard’s project, The great room, includes work from her ongoing project making photographs with her mom, Antonette Berger, within Berger’s home in Philadelphia, PA. With support from The PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant, Hubbard will publish The great room as a photography book with Loose Joints Publishing in spring, 2025. Publishing The great room allows the work to be available and accessible to a much wider audience and supports intimate viewership through the form of the book.   

Hubbard began this work in 2020, a time marked for many people by turning inwards, caretaking, and restructuring our worlds through our interconnectedness with family during the covid 19 pandemic. It was during this time that Hubbard’s mother started to experience severe memory loss and was eventually diagnosed with LATE, a brain disease which mimics the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. 

Berger is the first person Hubbard has photographed consistently, and Hubbard describes her process as —using photography to enter my mom’s world as a kind of balm and relief from all the feelings born from needing her to remain in this one—I believe deeply that photography is a form of sociality and a way of being in the world. In this case I am using the camera as a means of creating time with my mom apart from the brutal task of managing her.  Photography transforms her home from a space which overwhelms me into a stage where the accumulation of her life’s collections and perverse sense of composition become the world of the image.

Using two large format 4x5 film cameras Hubbard and Berger circulate through Berger’s home, moving various props, mirrors, and photography equipment along with them on their rotations through space, often making photographs as companion work to the rituals that make up daily life such as bathing, organizing, and watching tv. Over time the world of the image makes smaller and smaller concentric circles around a false wall built to separate Berger’s bedroom from the larger great room— a room which at present functions as haphazard storage. 

Included in the project are unique experimental body prints made in a traditional black and white darkroom. Hubbard brought her mother into the darkroom for the purpose of creating cameraless photographs which correlate the final image through forms of touch and pressure— offering an immediacy and directness of the body, less focused on the identification of an individual person yet picking up on the movement, texture, and quality of the skin surface. As unique experimental contact prints these images are one-to-one scale with the body and allow the proximity between Hubbard and Berger to materialize intimacy through their physicality with the photographic paper.

The great room uses the architecture of the home, the immediacy of touch and the physicality of gesture to suggest a relationship that is at once stable as there is a foundation of love yet complicated by the confusion and grief of a mother and daughter who find themselves in a collision of sorts. The work is in and of itself a form of mourning which wrestles with the reception of a person through the image and the uncanny way that photographs can hold a person up and make them feel more themselves then they are in reality.