When down at the Archisle I was introduced to the idea of hidden mothers. This was a craze during the Victorian period where families wanted their photographs to be taken of their children. The mother would hold the baby still with a sheet over their head so that they would not be seen. Looking at the images is hilarious as it is so obvious that there was a person behind the sheet. I find this idea so strange but it also really intrigues me. I feel that I would be able to link this to the idea of witchcraft and how they were set aside from society. I also just find this particular ‘style’ of photography very strange and something that I want to know more about! It is so odd but it somehow makes a lot of sense to just hold the baby and cover yourself with a blanket, I guess it would have been the Victorian’s way of PhotoShop. This also reminds me of Francesca Woodman and how she makes images and doesn’t retouch them afterwards, she does it live. I like this sense of making an image that is actually there in the present. It almost brings an element of truth to them, in that nothing was ever retouched or edited afterwards. It was raw, then and there and so they worked with what they had.

When looking at the images of the mother’s with their children I am actually surprised at how the children aren’t actually crying or smiling, they don’t seem to have any emotions. I find some of these images really obvious and the spectator is able to clearly see that there is a person underneath the blanket but in others it actually blends well and the mother looks like a chair or something because of the way she is positioned. I do like these images as they are so strange but something about them really interests me and I want to know why other than the obvious reasons they chose to photograph them in this way. I could see if the mothers was hidden away off to the side or something but the photographers chose to just have the child sat on her lap and simply put a sheet over her. When reading more about the Hidden Mothers I found out that it used to take a minute and a half for the image to register so the subject would need to remain still for that period of time which was obviously harder for a child/baby to do than that of an adult. Often photographers would be female as by the late 1800s it was seen as one of the more respectable jobs for middle-class women. Something else that I found out was that the babies weren’t allowed to smile in the photographs as this would mess with the exposure and leave it blurred in the final photograph.

Experimentation

I tried to recreate this style of photographing with my sister and niece but it didn’t really work out as my niece wasn’t in the right mood to sit still and wait for me to make a photograph of her. I have however taken inspiration from the idea of Hidden Mothers and am thinking about doing an experiment with my mum and having her pose with a blanket over her head. I came up with a spin off idea of the hidden mother and how they are supposed to blend in with the scenery and be invisible. For a shoot  that I have done with my mum is that the expected role of women is often overlooked and is almost unspoken about that we almost forget how much mothers really do. Their everyday house chores become the norm and they seem to do everything without ever being noticed. I wanted to explore this in two different ways so I decided to make some images of my mum with a sheet over her head and others where I have edited out any bare flesh and just left her with clothing. I want to show how sometimes mothers are invisible and everything that they do for their families isn’t always acknowledged. These images aren’t good at all and I am not happy with how they have turned out. I have now changed my mind and am going to leave this experimentation as it isn’t to the standard that I want and I just don’t like them.

This was the only decent image that came out of the mini shoot I did with my niece as she wasn’t in the best of moods and didn’t really want to do it. I could try and do another shoot with her but I am unsure whether or not I like the images and how it all looks. I feel that I wouldn’t be able to get a good location where the mother (my sister) would be able to blend well and make it look somewhat like a studio like the ones in the Victorian times. I do like that my nieces foot is moving as it looks as though she is some sort of ghost with it looking blurred which is what would have happened back in the Victorian times due to the long exposures they needed to use. Part of me likes this image and thinks that I could maybe work on it more and see what happens with it but I don’t want to make my niece do something that she doesn’t want to do. However, after she decided she didn’t want to sit still she put the sheet over her own head and started walking around wearing it which I captured and it looked quite funny. I don’t like the background of this image as I had to quickly set everything up and make do with what I had as there was a limited time that my niece was round and again she was in a bad mood.

I also tried to do a bit of experimentation with my mum but it was difficult as my mum isn’t the best at getting into all of the odd poses and positions I asked her to do as she obviously isn’t used to my obscure style of photography. I think that I could re-stage this and remake it myself as I have made images where the bare flesh on the persons body is taken away to just leave the image with their clothes and what they are doing. I think that these images are ok but I know that I can do a lot better than what I have produced so far. I might mix this into some kind of narrative and try to create more of a series in the theme of surrealism and narrative photography combined. This idea was interesting and I do think I could expand on this project some more to make stronger images. I only managed to get a few images out of this as it was just a quick experiment that I didn’t want to spend too much time on before fully committing to the idea. I now know how long each one would roughly take to edit and think that I would have plenty of time to get a mini series of possibly 8 to 12 images. The only thing about this particular set of images is it is very similar to that of my coursework as I wanted to create it as a kind of expansion onto it as I got my subject to wear the same dress and it follows the same theme. The images below aren’t the best and I can definitely do a lot better but just as a starter of experimentation they are fine.