abigail's pictures

February 28, 2013

I was perusing my grandparents’ belongings and found this photo of my (awesome) grandmother when she was three months old in 1924. I was super-excited when I found it because I think it’s a hidden-mother portrait.

For those who don’t know, hidden-mother portraits were really popular in the Victorian era. Then as now, people loved baby portraits, but exposure times were so long that kids tended to squirm. So, the mother would hold the child still and hide herself with a blanket or something. (Why they couldn’t just have the mom in the photo is beyond me, though I think it had something to do with the size of the image.)

Anyway, this looks for all the world like a hidden-mother portrait. (If the thing behind her isn’t my great-grandmother, what is it?) One problem: it was taken in 1924, decades after the heyday of hidden-mother photography. By the 1920s, exposure times should have been fast enough that a hidden mother would be unnecessary. I have a few theories about this pic but would be really interested in input from others:

1) The picture was taken in 1924, but using an old camera with a long exposure time. According to family tradition, my grandma’s family was so poor that she had to sleep in a dresser drawer because they couldn’t afford a crib. It makes sense that they would use the cheapest studio they could find to take their baby pictures, and such a studio might well use a 40- or 50-year-old camera. You can actually see a blur where her left foot was moving, which reinforces the old-camera hypothesis. I think this is the most likely theory.

2) The thing she’s sitting on is not a person. Some studios had highchair-like stands that held the baby still. Though I’m not sure how to explain the lumpiness behind her if it’s just a weirdly-shaped chair.

3) The baby is not my grandma. The identification on the back is written in my grandma’s handwriting with a ballpoint pen, which dates it to the ‘50s at the earliest. It might be an older relative she misidentified as herself.

4) They were imitating the hidden-mother style by choice rather than necessity. This strikes me as weird and unlikely. That said, my great-grandparents might have been trying to mimic the composition of their own baby photos.

Anyway, if this is indeed a hidden-mother pic from 1924, it’s the latest one I’ve ever seen, in life or online. A great find if I may say so.

11:56am | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZN1BiwfCZlfY

(Notes: 14)