I Enjoy Looking At Old Photographs,

but way back photography was not as easy as it is today,

especially photographing babies, the subject in this case, the child, had to sit still, photograph credit: Anonymous work, XIX век, Public Domain, accessed via Wikimedia Commons, the first form of photograph available to the masses was the daguerreotype. Invented by Louis Daguerre in 1839, it was highly popular in the 1840s and 1850s, a piece of silver-plated copper was polished until it was as smooth as a mirror, and then light-sensitive chemicals were applied to the surface,

photograph credit: Anonymous work, XIX век, Public Domain, accessed via Wikimedia Commons, this plate was then put into a camera ready for use. The shutter would be opened, exposing the plate to the light for as long as necessary to capture the scene, the key phrase here is “as long as necessary” because on a bright, sunny day, the plate might need only a few seconds of exposure before the chemicals could capture the image. However, if the subject was in a dimly lit room, the exposure time might need to be anywhere from 30 seconds to a couple of minutes,

photograph credit, collection of Lee Marks and John C. DePrez Jr., Shelbyville, INdiana (left, center); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Lee Marks and John C. DePrez Jr. (2019.1841) (right), the baby is obviously going to move and spoil the photograph, the solution? Put the baby on its mothers lap, but the mother often did not wish to appear in the photograph, hence in many photographs of the time there is a sinister shape behind the child, the mother hidden under a blanket!

photograph credit: Неизвестный фотограф II половины XIX века, Public Domain, accessed via Wikimedia Commons, if the child really wouldn’t sit still except on its mother’s lap wearing a blanket, then there was no option but to have the mother herself in the picture but concealed somehow. The resulting image could look quite bizarre, depending on the choices made. In some cases, photographers would just put a blanket over the mother’s head but otherwise leave her in shot. The viewer can see her, but she’s not strictly part of the picture, 

photograph credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Lee Marks and John C. DePrez, Jr. (2019.1876), (2019.1838), sometime in the 2010s, public interest in hidden mother photography spiked as various images were shared on the internet. After that, both professional photographers and amateurs started forming collections, in 2013, Italian-Swedish artist Linda Fregni Nagler collected together 997 photographs that not only went on display at the 55th Venice Biennale, but also appeared in a book entitled The Hidden Mother, commenting on the reasons why mothers might go to such lengths not to be in photographs, Nagler said: “The mothers seem to have been aiming to create an intimate bond between the child and the viewer, rather than between themselves and the child.” photographer Laura Larson was another person to produce a book dedicated to the hidden mother. After touring with an exhibition of 35 hidden mother photographs in 2014-5, Larson’s book Hidden Mother was published in 2017, Hidden Mother interwove Victorian pictures with Larson’s story of adopting her own daughter from Ethiopia. The book was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award, back to today just a quick ‘click’ and the photograph is made, as far as photography is concerned, we have never had it so good!