Home

Several years ago a friend sent me a few “Hidden Mother” photographs. These are studio portraits from the late 1800’s in which an infant or child is seated on a person who is obscured by cloth. The odd images stuck with me, mostly because I had not seen anything like them before, though I had taught photography for over 20 years. In researching why these portraits were not well documented in the history of photography, I realized that, like the mothers in the photos, they were also hidden from the photographic dialog and dismissed as Victorian oddities. Since there were thousands of these images, I wondered if the desire to “hide a mother” would continue once laypeople had cameras. The collection presented here posits the theory that the studio phenomenon of “Hidden Mother” photography evolved into what I am calling “Missing Mother” photography. Though the “mother” is no longer draped in cloth, the desire to photograph infants and children while excluding the mothers endures. For more information on “Missing Mother” photographs, please go to the ABOUT menu and select Hidden to Missing. If you know the “missing mother,” a child, or the photographer of an image, please go to the Locate a Mother menu.