‘Hidden mothers’ reveal labour, love
COLLECTORS relish so-called “hidden mother photographs” as historical oddities.
These 19th-century images contain very young children held still by half-obscured adults who crouch behind chairs or lurk at the margins of pictures, their protective arms stabilising the babies.
The heads and shoulders of the adults are sometimes draped in textiles or summarily cut off, or their bodies are partially tucked behind decorative mats that frame the centred child.
The startling realisation that Victorian infants were not reclining on cozy blankets but on comfortable laps fuels breathless online attention. Eager resellers of fleamarket finds advertise hidden mother photographs using terms like “spooky wonderful”, “cutie creepy” and “bizarre”.
Articles about them tend to imply a treasure hunt for hiddenness – for adult knees or noses, poised hands, bosoms, hat brims and skirts. But this common framing reduces their cultural importance to sensationalism: look at how kooky our ancestors were!
As someone who has studied the history of these photos, I find myself drawing an unlikely connection between these stiff, sepia portraits and modern candid snapshots of mischievous children delighting their adoring mothers. Both are part of the tradition of sentimental image-making that surrounds the iconic figure of mother and child.
Exposure times in 19th-century photography were very long by current standards – 20 to 60 seconds – which helps explain why trusted adults were needed to soothe infant subjects into the stillness necessary to take a portrait. But this technological limitation doesn’t explain why their mothers were half-erased from these photos, which has led scholars to argue that Victorian women were effaced by their culture, and casual viewers to assume that the photographers who produced these visual gaffes were hilariously bad at their craft.
But my research has shown that Victorian photographers were documenting children at a moment of widespread desire to focus cultural attention on childhood as a precious time that ought to be protected. And the partial obfuscation of mothers was not inconsistent with images of beloved children, because to cherish is to hold. These are, in short, images of care.
Photography was a new technology in the 19th century. Early photographers coated thin metal plates with light-sensitive material, exposed them behind the camera’s lens and developed the plates through precise chemical processes. Each exposure yielded a unique and unreproducible picture directly on the metal.
The fragile daguerreotypes of the early 1840s launched a period of constant experimentation. Photographers eventually perfected sturdier tintypes – also unreproducible images on metal plates – and later revolutionised the medium with glass negatives that enabled multiple prints of the same image. These prints required special paper made light sensitive with a coating of ammonium chloride stabilised in albumen, or egg white. With this process, photography became widely viable as a profession, a hobby and an art.
Comparing an 1860s tintype with an 1890s gelatin silver studio print shows the evolution of photographic processes.
The studio portrait is characterised by crisp focus, strong contrast between lights and darks, beautiful mid-tones to contour the baby’s cheek, and artful studio lighting to capture alert infant eyes. The tintype is its opposite in every aspect: its flattened quality and narrower tonal range are hallmarks of this less technically advanced photographic process.
But in both portraits, the sturdy hands of the loving mother stabilise the child. Modern viewers often assume that 19th-century customs consigned mothering to the margins. But the historical phenomenon of hidden mothers might be productively renamed “cherished child photographs”. This label more accurately identifies their child subjects and centres the relationship, the cherishing, that is at their heart. It also offers a fruitful avenue for tender contemplation of mothers, children, and the myriad forms of motherwork, on Mother’s Day and beyond. |