Is there a “Hidden Mother” lurking within the photos of your ancestors? Look closer! A “Hidden Mother” isn’t a supernatural event, or an alien from outer space. Instead, it is a clever way to safely take a great photo of a baby, long before Photoshop was invented.
It is natural for parents to take lots and lots of photos of their newborn. It is a way to capture just how precious, and tiny, a child was before he grew into a “big boy”. Baby photos are one way that parents can hold on to a vivid memory of exactly what their child was like as a newborn. Genealogists might see photos of ancestors, when that person was an infant, as a way to document how one ancestor relates to another one.
This impulse to take a photo of your adorable baby isn’t new. People have been doing this for generations. Today, a person can use his or her phone to take a quick snapshot of their baby, upload that photo to their computer, crop out the clutter in the background, and put it on their Facebook page, for the whole family to see. In the past, the technology involved with photography didn’t allow for such quick alterations of the original photo.
The result was “Hidden Mother” photos. It was a nineteenth century solution to a common problem that occurs when trying to photograph a baby. How will you get the child to sit still, and look at the camera? Today, photos take less than a second to create. In the days of tintypes, though, photos required people to sit still for what would be considered an extremely long time by our standards today.
I have included an example of a “Hidden Mother” photo at the top of this blog. At first glance, you see an infant in a long, draping, gown, who is precariously balanced on the edge of an oddly shaped couch of some kind. Look again! What you are really seeing is the baby’s mother with a cloth covering her up.
The purpose was to take a “portrait” type photo of the baby, all by himself. For safety purposes, the mother often needed to hold the baby, (or, at least, hold him upright), for the duration of the photo. To keep the mother out of the shot, a cloth was draped over her. Now, all you see is the baby. Some of these tintypes would have a mat placed over the original photo, that focused on the child (and took the curiously shaped furniture the baby was sitting on right out of the picture).
Flickr has an interesting collection of “Hidden Mother” tintype photos. If you have a few minutes, go take a look at them. These photos might seem a bit creepy, at first. However, when you consider their purpose, and the technology that photographers were working with back then, these photos become rather amazing.
Image by ‘Playingwithbrushes’ on Flickr