Fugue by Lydia Goldblatt is a body of work about love and grief, mothering and losing a mother, intimacy and distance, told through photographs and writing. Centring on the domestic space and made over the course of four years, it tells a story that is neither apologetic nor idealised.

When Goldblatt became a mother she found herself unable to make pictures. However, after her own mother died, she began to photograph again, both at home and in the city around her.

‘I wanted to be honest about what I was struggling with, about the feelings of claustrophobia and rage, as much as intimacy and love. These are feelings so often hidden by mothers, so often silenced as unacceptable.’

Lydia Goldblatt is a British photographic artist based in London. Her work has been widely exhibited, including the National Portrait Gallery, Somerset House London, the National Museum Gdansk, the GoEun Museum of Photography in South Korea and the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Germany. Her first book, Still Here, is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum National Art Library, and her work is held in numerous public and private collections including the National Portrait Gallery and The Women’s Library, London. Her work appears regularly in publications including Guardian Saturday Magazine, Financial Times, Telegraph, and Sunday Times Magazines, New Statesman, New Yorker, De Zeit, and Wallpaper*, amongst others. Goldblatt received the GRAIN Projects Artist Commission in 2020 to develop Fugue, and received an award for her portrait from the series in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Martin Barnes is Senior Curator of Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A). After gaining an MA in Art Museum Studies from the Courtauld Institute of Art, he began working at the V&A in 1995. Since then he has built and researched the collection, devised exhibitions, and conceived and developed the V&A Photography Centre. His special interests include early processes and experimental photography, nature and the environment. 

Martin has published extensively on historical and contemporary photography and curated numerous exhibitions, often with accompanying books, including: Twilight:Photography in the Magic Hour (2006); Something That I’ll Never Really See: Contemporary Photography from the V&A (2008); Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography (2010); Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography (2011); Island Stories: 50 Years of Photography in Britain (2012); Richard Learoyd: Dark Mirror (2015); Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century (2016); the British Pavilion, Dubai Photo (2016); Into the Wooods: Trees in Photography (2017) and Maurice Broomfield: Industrial Sublime (2021).