Hidden mother photography is a genre of photography common in the Victorian era in which young children were photographed with their mother present but hidden in the photograph. It arose from the need to keep children still while the photograph was taken due to the long exposure times of early cameras.
The daguerreotypes that became publicly available during the 1840s had exposure times from tens of seconds to several minutes. [1] [2] While exposure times shrank as photographic technology developed, to get a clear picture of a child during the 19th century the child had to be persuaded to stay still, which could be difficult to achieve. [3] One technique was for the mother—or sometimes the father, a nanny or the photographer's assistant—to be hidden within the frame, often behind curtains, under cloaks, or disguised as chairs. [3] Mothers were also sometimes obscured simply by removing parts of the photograph afterward, or by them standing slightly off to one side so they could be cropped out. [3] How successfully the mother was hidden varied. Sometimes, simply draped with fabric, their shape would be obvious. In some photographs, arms are clearly visible. [4] A paper overlay could be used when framing the photograph to hide the parts showing the mother, focusing on the child instead. [5] The practice of hidden mother photography continued into the 1920s, fading away as cameras became faster and more ubiquitous. [6]
Interest in hidden mother photography spiked in the 2010s, driven in part by the rise of the Internet, which made the images more easily available. This in turn raised interest in collections of them at museums such as the Palmer Museum of Art. [7] A Flickr pool was set up dedicated to collecting hidden mother images. [8]
Having collected them for a decade, in 2013 Italian-Swedish artist Linda Fregni Nagler displayed 997 photographs in a series entitled The Hidden Mother at the Venetian Arsenal for the 55th Venice Biennale. [6] She also published them in the book The Hidden Mother (2013) with words by Geoffrey Batchen and the Biennale's curator, Massimiliano Gioni. [9] The images were produced between the 1840s and the 1920s using a variety of techniques. They include daguerreotypes, ambrotypes (which use the wet plate collodion process), tintypes and albumen prints. [6] The first picture that prompted the collection was a 5×4 centimetre tintype described on eBay as "funny baby with hidden mother". [10] Nagler's theory as to why the mothers are hidden, rather than simply appearing in the picture undisguised, is that "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." [11]
In 2014 and 2015, photographer Laura Larson presented a series of around 35 hidden mother photographs as a touring exhibition. [12] Her book, Hidden Mother (2017), told the story of her daughter's adoption from Ethiopia through 26 hidden mother photographs. [13] It was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award that year. [14]
Lee Marks, a photography dealer from Indiana, is another long-term collector with around 600 hidden mother images. [15]
The eerie effect of the half-obscured mothers in these pictures has led to them being compared to ghosts, including by Larson and by the tabloid press. [12] Larson's collection began as an offshoot of her study of spirit photography of the Victorian era. [15]
Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed in many fields of science, manufacturing, and business, as well as its more direct uses for art, film and video production, recreational purposes, hobby, and mass communication.
A photograph is an image created by light falling on a photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor, such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are now created using a smartphone/camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of what the human eye would see. The process and practice of creating such images is called photography.
The following list comprises significant milestones in the development of photography technology.
Calotype or talbotype is an early photographic process introduced in 1841 by William Henry Fox Talbot, using paper coated with silver iodide. Paper texture effects in calotype photography limit the ability of this early process to record low contrast details and textures. The term calotype comes from the Ancient Greek καλός, "beautiful", and τύπος, "impression".
Daguerreotype was the first publicly available photographic process; it was widely used during the 1840s and 1850s. "Daguerreotype" also refers to an image created through this process.
Astrophotography, also known as astronomical imaging, is the photography or imaging of astronomical objects, celestial events, or areas of the night sky. The first photograph of an astronomical object was taken in 1840, but it was not until the late 19th century that advances in technology allowed for detailed stellar photography. Besides being able to record the details of extended objects such as the Moon, Sun, and planets, modern astrophotography has the ability to image objects invisible to the human eye such as dim stars, nebulae, and galaxies. This is accomplished through long time exposure as both film and digital cameras can accumulate and sum photons over long periods of time.
The collodion process is an early photographic process. The collodion process, mostly synonymous with the "collodion wet plate process", requires the photographic material to be coated, sensitized, exposed, and developed within the span of about fifteen minutes, necessitating a portable darkroom for use in the field. Collodion is normally used in its wet form, but it can also be used in dry form, at the cost of greatly increased exposure time. The increased exposure time made the dry form unsuitable for the usual portraiture work of most professional photographers of the 19th century. The use of the dry form was therefore mostly confined to landscape photography and other special applications where minutes-long exposure times were tolerable.
Johann Augustin Pucher was a Slovene priest, scientist, photographer, artist, and poet who invented an unusual process for making photographs on glass.
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was a French artist and photographer, recognized for his invention of the eponymous daguerreotype process of photography. He became known as one of the fathers of photography. Though he is most famous for his contributions to photography, he was also an accomplished painter, scenic designer, and a developer of the diorama theatre.
The ambrotype also known as a collodion positive in the UK, is a positive photograph on glass made by a variant of the wet plate collodion process. Like a print on paper, it is viewed by reflected light. Like the daguerreotype, which it replaced, and like the prints produced by a Polaroid camera, each is a unique original that could only be duplicated by using a camera to copy it.
A tintype, also known as a melainotype or ferrotype, is a photograph made by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal coated with a dark lacquer or enamel and used as the support for the photographic emulsion. Tintypes enjoyed their widest use during the 1860s and 1870s, but lesser use of the medium persisted into the early 20th century and it has been revived as a novelty and fine art form in the 21st.
The science of photography is the use of chemistry and physics in all aspects of photography. This applies to the camera, its lenses, physical operation of the camera, electronic camera internals, and the process of developing film in order to take and develop pictures properly.
Heliography from helios, meaning "sun", and graphein (γράφειν), "writing") is the photographic process invented, and named thus, by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce around 1822, which he used to make the earliest known surviving photograph from nature, View from the Window at Le Gras, and the first realisation of photoresist as means to reproduce artworks through inventions of photolithography and photogravure.
The history of photography began with the discovery of two critical principles: camera obscura image projection and the observation that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light. There are no artifacts or descriptions that indicate any attempt to capture images with light sensitive materials prior to the 18th century.
Hand-colouring refers to any method of manually adding colour to a monochrome photograph, generally either to heighten the realism of the image or for artistic purposes. Hand-colouring is also known as hand painting or overpainting.
Spirit photography is a type of photography whose primary goal is to capture images of ghosts and other spiritual entities, especially in ghost hunting. It dates back to the late 19th century. The end of the American Civil War and the mid-19th Century Spiritualism movement contributed greatly to the popularity of spirit photography. Photographers such as William Mumler and William Hope ran thriving businesses taking photos of people with their supposed dead relatives. Both were shown to be frauds, but "true believers", such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, refused to accept the evidence as proof of a hoax.
Post-mortem photography is the practice of photographing the recently deceased. Various cultures use and have used this practice, though the best-studied area of post-mortem photography is that of Europe and America. There can be considerable dispute as to whether individual early photographs actually show a dead person or not, often sharpened by commercial considerations. The form continued the tradition of earlier painted mourning portraits. Today post-mortem photography is most common in the contexts of police and pathology work.
Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours was a French optician and daguerreotypist. He is best known today for his Excursions Daguerriennes, books of views of the world's monuments, based on early photographs redrawn by hand as Aquatint engravings.
The practice and appreciation of photographyin the United States began in the 19th century, when various advances in the development of photography took place and after daguerreotype photography was introduced in France in 1839. The earliest commercialization of photography was made in the country when Alexander Walcott and John Johnson opened the first commercial portrait gallery in 1840. In 1866, the first color photograph was taken. Only in the 1880s, would photography expand to a mass audience with the first easy-to-use, lightweight Kodak camera, issued by George Eastman and his company.
Laura Larson is an American photographer based in Columbus, Ohio.
In a letter to the editor of The Spectator, Claudet explained that he gave his exposures as in June 10 to 20 seconds; in July, 20 to 40 seconds and in September, 60 to 90 seconds.
On a cloudy day, the exposure was given as three or four minutes
