‘Father’ by Lydia Goldblatt as part of her ‘Still Here’ series and
she donated this one-off digital c-type print for our movement and
exhibition in May.
It’s a powerful and moving image – how does it speak to you?
Lydia writes: Photographing, for me, is a means of giving expression to
both the internal and external processes that shape our experience of
life. My work considers transitional human states and is tied to
concepts of identity and belonging. These images are from a
series about my parents, focusing on my elderly father’s mortality, and
stemming from a desire to address the inevitable changes wrought by his
approaching death.
I am
witnessing human fragility, the physical and psychological boundaries of
a human essence. I am interested in the indefinable thresholds that
mark out our individual existence, and in the subtle process of erasure
that returns us to the state from which we emerge.
While the work
is about my family, it is also a means to contemplate the nature of
life and the invisible bonds of love. It engages with the constantly
shifting nature of time, and the potential of photographs to open up the
realm of experience via their poetic as well as indexical reality. In
making work about a personal experience of mortality, I am exploring the
cyclical scope of existence that sees nature’s fingers unpick our
fragile yet insistent efforts to build, construct and create.“
We are making a space to allow you to open up & be yourself – The Calm Photography Movement is using photography as a catalyst to start a conversation on male mental health, because what is it to be a man in today’s modern world?
