Lydia Goldblatt considers themes of origins, transience and emotional experience through a lyrical harnessing of photography’s primary characteristics of light, time and surface. Her works creatively fuse the approaches of both documentary and constructed photography. Tenderly observed portraits and details of the human form are combined with enigmatic still lifes and abstract constructions suggestive of elemental forces. Together, the images examine the impulse for existence paralleled with the act of artistic creation. While complete in themselves, each photograph can be understood as part of a larger whole: an absorbing puzzle reflecting upon the capacity of photography as poetic expression and simultaneously exploring emblems of the cycle of life.
Goldblatt’s series Still Here was published as an artist monograph by Hatje Cantz, and is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum National Art Library. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the National Portrait Gallery, London, Felix Nussbaum Museum, Germany, Somerset House, London, the GoEun Museum of Photography, South Korea and the National Museum, Gdansk. She was awarded the Grand Prix at 2014’s Tokyo International Photography Festival, and in 2016 undertook a year’s artist residency at the Florence Trust in London, where she developed her series Instar. She was awarded in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, 2020, for her portrait ‘Eden’, from the series Fugue.
Selected Awards and Residencies
2020 Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize
2020 GRAIN Projects Award
2016 Florence Trust Artist in Residence
2014 Awarded Grand Prix, Tokyo International Photography Festival Award
2014 Lensculture Exposure Awards
2013 Arts Council England Funding Award, for publication of Still Here and community photography workshops in collaboration with Photofusion and Age UK
2012 Magenta Flash Forwards Award, USA
2012 Ben Uri Museum, International Jewish Artist of the Year
2012 Nominated for Vic Odden Award by Anne Braybon, National Portrait Gallery
2011 Fundacion Botin Residency Award, with Paul Graham, Spain
2011 Daylight Awards, USA
2010 Nominated for Sovereign European Art Prize
2010 Artist in Residence, Camberwell College of Arts
2009 Artist in Residence, Multyfarnham Friary, Ireland
2008 Wallpaper Magazine, Next Generation, Our Stars of Tomorrow
2007 Pavilion Commissions Award
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2016 Instar, Florence Trust, London
2015 Still Here, Rick Wester Fine Art, New York
2013 Still Here, Felix Nussbaum Museum, Germany
2011 Still Here, Broadbent Gallery, London
2009 And The Word Was God, Lianzhou International Photography Festival, China
2008 And The Word Was God, Pavilion Gallery, Leeds
2007 Keeping Time, Tricycle Gallery, London
Selected Group Exhibitions
2021 Fugue, Format Festival, Derby
2020 Taylor Wessing Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, London
2019 On Making, curated by Sian Bonnell, National Museum Gdansk, Poland
2019 Instar, Format Festival, Derby
2019 Here Today, Centre for Photography at Woodstock, USA
2019 Kinship, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool
2019 209 Women, Houses of Parliament, London
2016 Two Moons, GoEun Museum of Photography, South Korea
2016 Still Here, Format Festival, Derby
2015 Photo London, Wapping Project Bankside
2015 Seoul Lunar Photo Festival, South Korea
2014 Brighton Photo Biennial, Uncertain States, UK
2014 Tokyo International Photography Festival
2014 Nine, Four Corners Gallery, London
2013 Spectacle, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast Photo Festival (selectors Brett Rogers and Alec Soth)
2011 Transience, Galerie Huit, Arles
2010 Straying Closer to the Truth, exhibition and symposium, Multyfarnam Friary, Ireland
2009 Family Archives: Lost and Found, curator Val Williams, Skolska 28, Prague
2007 Pavilion Commissions Exhibition, Photofusion, London
Work in Collections
National Portrait Gallery
V&A Museum National Art Library
Elton John Private Collection
The Women’s Library, London
Selected Workshops and Teaching
2015 Tokyo International Festival of Photography, emerging photographer workshops
2015 South Bank University, BA Photography, lecturer
2013 Intergenerational Photography Workshops, Photofusion
2010 Bielefeld University, BA Photography, lecturer
2009 Portsmouth University, BA Photography, lecturer
Bibliography
2022
The Guardian, My Best Shot, Chris Broughton
2021
Elephant Magazine, The Politics of Parenting, Charlotte Jansen
It’s Nice That, Ayla Angelos
2020
Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize 2020, National Portrait Gallery
National Portrait Gallery interview, Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize 2020
2019
On Making exhibition catalogue, essay by curator Sian Bonnell
On Making exhibition catalogue, essay by curator Malgorzata Taraszkiewicz-Zwolicka
2016
A Small Voice: Conversations with Photographers, Ben Smith
2014
New Yorker Photo Booth, Thea Traff, feature on Still Here
Slate Magazine David Rosenberg, feature on Still Here
Featureshoot, Alison Zavos, Photo du Jour
Photomonitor, review of Still Here by Emma Lewis, curator Tate Modern
De Zeit, review of Still Here
Fast Company, Carey Young
Schlaues Haus exhibition interview, Andrea Fuest, Oldenberg
2013
The Telegraph, Rupert Christiansen, Arts Diary, feature on Still Here
The Telegraph, Cheryl Newman and Livia Bonadio, Inspirational Books for 2014
Conscientious Photography Magazine, JM Colberg, review of Still Here
Salon Litteraire, Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret, Lydia Goldblatt, surface peau et condition humaine
Photobookstore, Rodrigo Orrantia, review of Still Here
What we hear when we look: The (In)audibility of Photographs, Clare Hewitt
Hotshoe Magazine, Miranda Gavin, Still Here
Independent on Sunday Arts and Books, Karen Kelner, review of Still Here
Observer New Review’s ‘Month in Photography’
Wallpaper Magazine, October Literary Review
2012
Martin Deppner inaugural address, Felix Nussbaum Museum
Portfolio Showcase Vol.6, group publication, Center for Fine Art Photography, USA
Daylight Awards Interview, Kate Levy, USA
‘Flesh and Blood’, interview with Christiane Monarchi, Photomonitor
2011
‘When what divides us, unites us’, essay by Kong Yen Lin, Brighton Photo Biennale
2008
Pavilion Commissions Catalogue, essay by Dr Catherine Grant
Metro Newspaper, And The Word Was God exhibition review, Richard Smirke
Vision Magazine, And The Word Was God
Hotshoe Magazine, Pavilion Commissions 2007
Wallpaper Magazine, Next Generation, Our Stars of Tomorrow
British Journal of Photography, Endframe
Fieldstudy 8, Photography and the Archive Centre, University of the Arts London
Shop
Fugue
)
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.’
Published by GOST Books, June 2024
199 x 250 mm
192pp, 120 images
Hardback, clothbound cover
ISBN 978-1-915423-40-5
Still Here
)
"These are scenes that Rembrandt might have rendered, and they express something beyond words or reason."
Rupert Christiansen, Telegraph Newspaper, 2013
Still Here by Lydia Goldblatt takes as its point of departure the family home. The work stems from a desire to address the inevitable changes wrought by her elderly father’s approaching death. Her image making combines close observations of the human form with still lives, portraits and abstract photographs resonant of planets and origins.
Marked with tenderness, the work is a concentrated meditation on mortality, time, love and loss. Still Here explores the indefinable thresholds that mark out individual existence, and the subtle process of erasure that returns us to the state from which we emerge. In making work about a personal experience of mortality, Goldblatt explores the cyclical scope of existence that sees nature’s fingers unpick our fragile yet insistent efforts to build, construct and create.
Published by Hatje Cantz, 2014
219 x 236 mm
92pp, 45 images
Hardback, clothbound cover
ISBN 978-3-7757-3628-2