‘We got naked and covered ourselves in Vaseline’: Katherine Hubbard on photographing her ailing mother

Over five years, Hubbard photographed her mother at home as her memory declined – even persuading her to make nude body prints. What does her mum think of the wrenchingly beautiful images?

At the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, artist Katherine Hubbard started to sense something was not right with her mother, Antonette Berger. “It was impossible at the time to say what I was noticing, but something was off.”

Berger was living alone in Philadelphia, and as restrictions were lifted, Hubbard went to stay with her. Berger was eventually diagnosed with LATE [limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy], a condition which causes symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s, though the decline in memory and day-to-day functioning is slower. The diagnosis was “a painful, drawn-out and confusing process – then a feeling of so much grief, so much loss”, Hubbard explains on Zoom from New York.