The Hidden Mother
Linda Fregni Nagler
United Kingdom. Mack. 2013. First edition. Softcover. 432
pages. Text in English. Very good.
The Hidden Mother is comprised of 1,002 photographs (from
daguerreotypes and tintypes to cartes de visite and cabinet cards), all
examples of a now redundant practice: to cloak or hide a parent within the
background of a child’s portrait, a common procedure from the advent of
photography up until the 1920s, when exposure times were relative slow, and a
hidden parent was required to hold the child still.
These hidden mothers can be discerned in the background
of every one of these portraits – looming behind their children, swaddled in
blankets, carpets and brocades as they support their progeny as the central
subject. The iterations vary, and in some instances the hidden mother is
revealed as a single hand, while in others the child is seated on a shrouded
figure, or the parent is quite literally hiding – ensuring that the child’s
identity is transposed over their own.
The images hold a certain degree of comedy – albeit
unintentional – because the viewer is asked to suspend their disbelief, to ‘not
see’ the hidden figure. Some contemporary onlookers would have simply not seen
the portrait’s hidden mother, indicative of the cultural nature of the act of
seeing. For other viewers, the hidden figure was an essential part of the
picture: high infant mortality rates meant that posthumous portraits were the
norm, and thus the hidden mother would signify to the viewer that this child
was alive.
Creating and defining a sub-genre of photography, Fregni
Nagler has accumulated images that repeat a particular gesture – the negation
of the parent in the interest of the legibility of the child. The many themes
bubbling under the surface of her collection are unified by the singular
principle of effacement – as if this gesture speaks of the nature of parenthood
itself, or of women’s place in a patriarchal society, where she is figured
without an identity of her own.
The collection also confronts the inevitable
self-effacing nature of the photographer and the collector. The artist herself
seems to hover over these images like a mother – conserving and safeguarding
these photographs; as collector, presenter and curator of the collection,
Fregni Nagler herself becomes another hidden mother.
Very good. Light wear to the covers. Internally, binding
tight. Beautiful clean pages and images. Now mylar protected. An excellent copy.
Scarce.