Hidden mother photography facts for kids

A Victorian toddler, mother's arm obscured by fabric

Hidden mother photography is a special type of photography from the Victorian era. In these pictures, young children were photographed with their mother nearby. But the mother was always hidden in the photo! This happened because early cameras needed a long time to take a picture. So, children had to stay very, very still.

Why Mothers Were Hidden

Early cameras, like the ones used in the 1840s, needed a long time to capture an image. Sometimes it took many seconds, or even several minutes! Getting a child to sit perfectly still for that long was super tricky.

To solve this, photographers came up with a clever idea. The mother, or sometimes a father or nanny, would hide in the picture. They might hide behind curtains or under big cloaks. Sometimes, they even pretended to be a chair! This way, they could hold the child steady without being seen.

Sometimes, the mother was hidden by removing parts of the photo later. Or she might stand just out of view so her part could be cut off. How well they were hidden varied a lot. Sometimes, you could still see their shape under the fabric. In other photos, an arm might be clearly visible.

This practice of hidden mother photography continued until the 1920s. It slowly stopped as cameras got much faster and easier to use.

Modern Interest in Hidden Mothers

In the 2010s, people became very interested in hidden mother photos again. This was partly because of the Internet, which made these old pictures easy to find. Museums, like the Palmer Museum of Art, also started showing collections of them. There's even a special online group on Flickr just for collecting these images!

An artist named Linda Fregni Nagler collected hidden mother photos for ten years. In 2013, she showed 997 of them in a series called The Hidden Mother. This display was at a big art show in Venice, Italy. She also published a book with the same name. The photos in her collection were taken between the 1840s and the 1920s. They used different old photography methods like daguerreotypes and tintypes.

Another photographer, Laura Larson, also showed about 35 hidden mother photos in 2014 and 2015. Her book, Hidden Mother (2017), used these photos to tell a story. It was about her daughter's adoption from Ethiopia.

A photography collector from Indiana, Lee Marks, also has about 600 hidden mother pictures.

Some people think the half-hidden mothers in these pictures look a bit spooky, like ghosts! Laura Larson's collection even started because she was studying old "spirit photography." That was a type of Victorian photo where people tried to capture images of ghosts.

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