I thought Radiohead’s new app could do the trick, I thought looking at images of the late Leonard Knight’s (rip) Salvation Mountain could do it, and I also tried Shoshi Games for longer periods of time, and yet this book keeps popping up in my mind: Under the title The Hidden Mother, Linda Fregni Nagler has compiled 1,002 photographs (anything from daguerreotypes and tintypes to cartes de visite and cabinet cards really) that are 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.” Isn’t it creepy to see all these moms looming behind their kids?
