The phrase ‘still here’ is a quietly powerful one. Weighted by the absence that it presupposes as much as the presence that it states, alluding to the imminent though describing the current, it is a phrase that can draw the past, the present, and the future in just a single breath. There could hardly be a more fitting title for a body of work that engages with time and its passing as Lydia Goldblatt’s Still Here does. Described as a ‘meditation on mortality’, the book – her first – contains a sequence of 45 colour, square-format images that Goldblatt shot in and around her family home over the two years at the end of her elderly father’s life. This period is represented not as a linear account but as a series of beautifully observed fragments; glimpses of her father and her mother, still-lifes, close-ups, and formal studies that flicker between perspectives and proximities in a manner that evokes the way in which time actually impresses itself upon us – stretched and compressed, reflected and refracted by the mind’s eye.
Still Here is a series in which the end of life appears to take on a presence of its own. It is there in the light that Goldblatt captures and the textures to which she draws our eye, and it is there too in the images that are more narrative and documentary in composition. It is difficult to express how imminent death can be strange and confronting and yet at the same time something with which we can develop an odd sort of acquaintance, but Goldblatt conveys this well. In images of supper served on trays, daytime naps, or limbs helped gently into soft bedding, for example, we see universal signs of routine, love and care enveloping the end of life into the pattern of the everyday. There are echoes here too of her earlier series Faith’s Repertoire (2010) and And The Word Was God (2007), which similarly reflect upon the ability of ritual to smooth and temper the unknown. Marked by a different tone are close-ups of her parents, which register the ways in which times of transition can make the familiar strange: tiny sprigs of her father’s bright white hair, the hollows and contours of his delicate frame, or her mother bathing, wedding ring glistening, are captured with a sense of intimacy and deep curiosity that feels as exploratory it does elegiac.
Throughout the book it is Goldblatt’s elegant use of light and shade that allows her to weave the narrative and the symbolic in this way. Her own shadow cast momentarily on the wall, her father’s face first lit in profile, then deliberately underexposed, or the fading light of an autumnal day each conjure a sense of the mutable and the impermanent. This is extended in the use of the circle as motif: the ragged form of a wilted narcissus head, milky discs of medicinal fluid absorbed into sheets of tissue paper, and a sequence of images of her father’s eye poignantly titled Oculus (focused), Oculus (out of focus) and Oculus (closed) are quietly powerful metaphors for the metaphysical, their presence reminding that where there is disappearance, so too there is return. Heightened no doubt by her relationship to – and indeed within – her subject matter, Goldblatt seems to have a sensitivity to such details that enables to her to tease them from the air like threads, evoking an entire atmosphere by the framing of one single, discrete, form. From a wristwatch on a windowsill to a flash of brilliant red on her mother’s shoe, these images possesses a luminescence that conveys how disparate moments can become crystallised in our minds and the cumulative impression is one that bears less of a resemblance to memorialising than to a reflection on the nature of memory itself. By capturing these details that might otherwise go unnoticed, Goldblatt articulates those moments of brilliant lucidity that can appear suddenly and without warning to anchor an otherwise fleeting observation in memory’s ripple and swell; allowing it to endure, though in a different form, long after that time has passed.
