Hidden or “Ghost” Parents in Victorian Photography
Encouraging children to sit still and look at the camera is a common problem. It was, however, more of a problem for the first photographers in the 19th century, with limitations imposed by the contemporary technology. One solution they came up with has handed down to us a legacy of images which are curious, laughable or sometimes just plain creepy.
The problem is caused by exposure time – the amount of time the photographic film or plate has to be exposed to light in order to capture the image. Any movement of the camera or subject during this time will leave you with a blurred picture – not an issue with the fast shutter speeds of modern cameras or for the several billion photographs we now upload every day from our mobile phones, where photographic film has been replaced with active-pixel image sensors.
Victorians Don’t Smile?
However, this definitely was a problem for 19th-century photographers. Early daguerreotype images from the 1840s typically took 15 minutes or more to expose – fine for still-life,
buildings and landscapes if there weren’t trees blown about by the wind, but rendering portrait photography a virtual impossibility. Even when more modern processes had reduced this to, say, 30 seconds, this is still a long time to keep your body, head and facial expression absolutely motionless (why not try it). Victorian photographers were equipped with a wide
variety of braces, rests and stands to keep their subjects still, but not much can be done for the face itself – and portrait sitters, particularly children (and pets) often came out with blurred faces. This is one reason why Victorian portrait photos typically show people with blank, unsmiling faces as they struggled to hold an expression. Also, having a photograph taken was seen as a formal occasion thus requiring a serious expression; smiling for the camera did not become a widespread social norm until the 1920s.
O Mother, Where Art Thou?
Back to where we started. My daughter recently showed me some online images of what have become known as missing mother pictures. I’d been aware of these but didn’t appreciate how widespread they were. Also known as “ghost mother” pictures, this was one solution those ingenious Victorians found to the problem of keeping children still while they were supposed to be posing for a photograph. The child is held in position by a parent – usually the mother – who is obscured in some rather unconvincing way. As can be seen in our gallery, this could involve said parent being out of shot with just an arm showing or, more commonly, camouflaged in some way. How anyone ever thought this was a good idea beggars belief; no doubt the intention was that the incognito parent would be less obvious once the photograph had been cropped, mounted and framed.
Some of these attempts are highly amusing; we laughed at parents disguised as chairs, standard lamps or sideboards, and sniggered at the disembodied limbs. Others, however, range from the bizarre to the downright spooky, where mother is shrouded like a pantomime ghost (it’s behind you!) or looms like a deathly spectre, particularly unsettling in the uncommon but creepy post-mortem portraits Victorian parents had taken of their dead children. Also on the unsettling side are where the mother’s face has simply been painted over, or been scratched out of the finished product – reminiscent of what my first wife did to our wedding photos. And, yes, my daughter and I did – with the help of a blanket – attempt a missing father selfie.
So while Victorian children were supposed to be seen and not heard, their parents were - in these intriguing examples at least - heard but not seen.
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