Katherine Hubbard’s photographs of her mother come to London’s Studio Voltaire

Katherine Hubbard’s five-year photographic project with her mother, Antonette Berger, will be shown at Studio Voltaire in London from 7 October. The Great Room brings together portraits, body prints and an installation drawn from the Philadelphia apartment where Hubbard cared for Berger as her memory declined. In a Guardian interview published on 29 September, Hubbard described how making the work gave them ways to spend time together during a difficult period of care.

A camera in the apartment

Hubbard told the Guardian that she began to sense something was wrong during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, when Berger was living alone in Philadelphia. After restrictions eased, Hubbard went to stay with her. Berger was eventually diagnosed with LATE, according to the interview; Hubbard described reaching that diagnosis as painful and drawn out. The diagnosis is Hubbard’s account as reported by the Guardian, rather than a medical finding independently established for this article.

As Hubbard took on a caregiving role, she began photographing Berger and the rooms around her. She set up two vintage Polaroid cameras and other equipment in Berger’s Germantown apartment and left them in place for five years. Hubbard said the cameras made room for play during demanding days and let her ask Berger to engage with her in ways she otherwise might not have. The photographs were made alongside ordinary domestic tasks, including the gradual packing and emptying of the apartment before Berger’s move to a care facility.

The setting carried a longer family history. Berger owned the large building and rented it out for 40 years, Hubbard told the Guardian. Hubbard remembered visiting tenants there as a child, when the place often felt like a community centre. Berger’s name for the apartment’s main living space gave The Great Room its title. The accompanying book, One Fifty One, takes its name from the building’s street number, the Guardian reported.

Portraits and body prints

The two also made large contact prints in a darkroom, pressing their Vaseline-covered bodies against photographic paper without a camera. Hubbard said the sessions had to be carefully arranged around Berger’s safety, including getting onto and off the paper. She told the Guardian that Berger disliked the Vaseline but objected when Hubbard asked whether she wanted to stop. That account describes Berger’s response to those sessions; it does not settle every question about consent across the project.

Hubbard addressed that difficulty directly in the interview. She said Berger’s willingness mattered, alongside her own responsibility to respect her mother’s limits, and described consent as more complex when a person has dementia. Asked what Berger thinks of the photographs, Hubbard said her mother draws strength and a sense of value from taking part and trusts her. Berger’s perspective is presented here through Hubbard’s account; the Guardian interview does not quote Berger giving her own assessment of the finished work.

The London exhibition and its context

Studio Voltaire describes The Great Room as Hubbard’s first institutional solo exhibition outside the United States. Its exhibition information says the London presentation will combine new and existing photographs with an architectural installation and experimental contact prints. It was developed with Vienna’s Secession, where an extended chapter was presented from 12 June to 30 August 2026. The London dates are 7 October 2026 to 10 January 2027; as of the Guardian interview’s publication, that presentation had yet to open.

The diagnosis named in Hubbard’s interview provides context for the work, but its clinical meaning requires care. A 2025 paper in Alzheimer’s & Dementia says LATE can produce progressive memory loss that is difficult to distinguish during life from Alzheimer’s-related disorders. Its authors proposed initial criteria for identifying possible or probable LATE in living patients and said those criteria need further validation. Their research does not establish Berger’s individual diagnosis or the course of her condition.

Hubbard’s account returns to the relationship behind the images. She told the Guardian that taking photographs helped create moments of levity amid caregiving, even as she and Berger prepared to leave the apartment that had long connected them. At Studio Voltaire, visitors will see work made across those five years: portraits of Berger in the rooms she inhabited and body prints produced through a shared, carefully managed physical process. How Berger values that experience is known publicly through what Hubbard has said about her.