Lydia GOLDBLATT: Still Here (Hatje Cantz, 2013)

In the series Still Here by Lydia Goldblatt (*1978 in London), the artist immerses her intimate photographs in sublime extremes of light and shade, tracing the fleeting shadow of personal existence onto enduring human narratives. Marked with tenderness, her work offers a concentrated meditation on mortality, time, love and loss, in which corporeal scrutiny courts metaphysical wonder. The images are often limited to a single detail: a timepiece abandoned on a shelf, a closed eyelid, the sunlit form of a bee.

Wedding Ring features just the legs and hand of the artist’s mother, standing naked in the bathtub. The silvery circlet seems to weigh heavy on her.

In Hinterland, the artist’s father is depicted at the literal edge of his physical form, a means of searching for the space between the physical and metaphysical.

Goldblatt gives witness to the ephemerality of life, combining portraits of her parents with metaphorical images that speak to the shifting nature of time.

Hatje Cantz, 2013

Hardcover, 9 1/4 x 8 1/2 inches

92 pages

Essay by Christiane Pratsch Monarchi

Signed