Hidden mother with child. Linda Fregni Nagler, #0173, tintype from The Hidden Mother, 997 collected daguerreotypes, tintypes, albumen prints, snapshots.
When my mother died in the mid-seventies, her only extant portrait took on a greater significance. Thus photography’s basic function: “Photography is an elegiac art,” as Susan Sontag wrote. To the little girl that was me, this portrait happened to be a document of the moment in which, for the first and last time, I had stood beside my mother in a studio, unaware that less than two months time she would be dead. That photograph must be a means of instruction, an exercise in recovering the moment that had passed, in recovering the features and presence of my mother or, as Barthes writes, “The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see [in this instance, my mother] has indeed existed.”
I never had the sense that the woman in the photograph was my mother. Perhaps it is the anxious expression she turns toward the lens, as though, having stepped out of her domestic fortress, she now stood powerless. Perhaps it is the dress she is wearing, one I only ever saw her in once or twice on expeditions into town. Or maybe it is the hair that hangs down to her waist and which was usually plaited into two long braids that circled her head in opposite directions. The woman in the picture is not just different from what I remember of her, or want to remember: she is a ghost, like the ghosts I would see on strips of negatives as a girl. I would hold them up to my eye, trying to guess who they were, and when I grew bored of this, would fashion these haunted ribbons into bracelets around my wrist.
A woman and a girl, pallid because the acids were not properly washed off the paper. The woman unsmiling (though unaware she was to die exactly forty-seven days later). The girl unsmiling (though unaware of what death was). The woman has the girl’s lips and brow (the girl has the nose of the man who will remain forever outside the frame). The woman’s hand on the girl’s shoulder. The girl’s hand clenched (not in anger but because it holds half a piece of caramel). The girl’s dress is not Egyptian cotton (Abdel Nasser, who manufactured everything, died years ago). The shoes are imports from Gaza (Gaza, as you’re aware, is no longer a free zone). The woman’s watch doesn’t work and has a broad strap (is that in keeping with the style of 1974?).
I wrote this poem in 2007 and it was published the following year before appearing in my 2013 collection Until I Give Up the Idea of Home. Setting aside questions of the poem’s ambitions or its failures, reading it now, I think of my mother’s portrait as an exercise in memory, a writing exercise, and at the same time a reexamination of the distance that divides us.
Why does the voice of the poem come across as neutral? Why does it invoke what is absent, draw out the connections between every detail within the image and all those that lie outside it? It is as though, being unable to reconstitute my mother from the picture, it simply reorganizes its component parts. Each sentence contains references to what the picture does not capture. It is a series of open-ended shots with no conclusion. If I had to rewrite it I might include other points of departure. Where, then, is my mother? Is the poem a blurred image of her? Or is it impossible for her to exist anywhere other than outside the frame—and never within it? Is my mother really so very distant? So mysterious? So hidden?
***
The earliest photographers resorted to various tricks in order to capture successful portraits of infants and little children. Naturally, they wanted pictures that weren’t blurred and for the infants to be their primary subjects: solitary, still, a minimum of thirty seconds motionless before the lens so that the image could be fixed in the wet collodion. To this end (so modern studies of nineteenth-century photography tell us), Victorian photographers would provide a specially designed chair to hold the children. But there was another stratagem, simpler and more successful: that the mother conceal herself behind the chair, or beneath a sheet or curtain, either holding the child or supporting them from behind so that they would adopt the desired pose. The success or failure of the resulting image, we can imagine, would depend on the professionalism and speed of the photographer, as well as the child’s mood and how safe they felt in proximity to their mother. Either they appeared in the photograph alone and unsupported—this being the goal—or else some evidence of the hidden mother would show: a hand, say, as though cut from a corpse, or the ghostly outline of her body through the sheets and covers.
In the 1860s, when the cost of studio photography was in reach of ever wider swathes of the middle class in Europe and North America, photographers devised other techniques.
For instance, removing the mother after the shot had been taken, excising her before the print was made, as it were, or developing the complete image on silvered sheets or glass plates, then scraping her away.
Various academic disciplines reference this phenomenon—there are many studies that touch on Victorian photography and the social life of the middle classes in the nineteenth century—but it also maintains a presence in late twentieth-century pop culture: you can find “hidden-mother photos” for sale on the websites of antique dealerships and online traders.
The Italian artist Linda Fregni Nagler noticed an advertisement on eBay for one of these images, labeled “Amusing photograph of a baby and his hidden mother” by the seller, and she began a project in the course of which she assembled more than a thousand images of this kind, all dating from the late nineteenth century to the twenties, and then published them in a book entitled The Hidden Mother.
We might think that the essence of motherhood here is sacrifice. That we are seeing mothers who have erased their identities in front of the camera for the sake of a common goal: that their newborn infants are shown unattached, the focus of the image. Geoffrey Batchen, professor of the history of photography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has come to this conclusion. In his essay, which accompanies the images in Nagler’s book, he writes:
Interestingly, although these supporting figures are sometimes indisputably male, they are invariably referred to as “hidden mother” images in vernacular circles (and even in the title of this work), as if the erasure of self that is enacted in such pictures is a manifestly feminine subject position, even a specifically maternal one. We are asked to witness an act of modesty and self-effacement on the part of each of these figures, but also to examine a picture of women’s place in a patriarchal society, where she is inevitably figured as without an identity of her own, a mere passage, a vehicle of reproduction, a conduit between a man and his child.
The majority of those hidden in the pictures are mothers; in a few hide fathers. Those images that show fathers hiding behind their children instead of their mothers also contain the mother. But where? Nagler tells us:
The position occupied by the mothers of the children in these images is often indecipherable. I became aware of a series of problems linked to this aspect when I myself tried to produce Hidden Mother photography. Using the most frequent staging technique, during the shoot a situation like this tends to come about: in front of the camera there’s a person with a curtain over their head, while on the other side there’s a photographer hidden under a black cloth, crouching behind his view camera. The child, in the middle, is thus surrounded by ghosts, and so there needs to be a third person there to distract him, to stop him getting scared, and this task is most likely down to the mother, who therefore remains outside our field of vision.
This passage from Nagler prompts me, in turn, to imagine the mother behind the camera, in her child’s field of view. She doesn’t take the picture herself: there’s a professional photographer, of course. If the mother is not in front of the camera holding her child then she is standing to the right or the left of the photographer, as though she is the camera’s eye, gazing into her child’s eyes, trying to project a sense of security from distance.
Browsing through this book, the reader is able to track the evolution of the ingenious means by which the mothers concealed themselves: as a throne strewn with flowers, a duck behind a bench, a life-size doll holding a baby. Assembled in a single volume, the images have the capacity to inspire laughter since we, as readers, are aware that someone is hidden and are, on the whole, able to guess where they are and how they are posed.
But there is something sad there, too. We encounter children who are unfamiliar to us, and realizing that a century or more has passed, we assume that they are dead. We encounter mothers who look like pieces of furniture, as though they represent death.
Surely at least one of the children from these photographs, after they had grown, their mother now dead and gone, sat down to inspect her blanketed silhouette, or perhaps her ghost that had once stood before the lens (or behind it), and said to the person beside them: “Look. This is my mother. My mother was there.”
***
My mother’s portrait bequeathed to me a fascination with images of motherhood. The archive of these images dates back to the mid-nineteenth century and in books dealing with photography is categorized according to class (Upper, Middle, Industrial Proletariat, et cetera) or theme (World War II, Mothers from Rwanda’s Ethnic Cleansing) or by photographer (Annie Leibovitz, Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt); there are even images from Facebook and the advertisements of professionals who specialize in photographing childbirth and family occasions. Here, the archive is the equivalent of the written narratives of motherhood discussed in the previous chapter.
Before I turned to the metaphor of the hidden mother, it was general questions about motherhood and photography that interested me. For instance: What is selected, documented, and displayed when motherhood becomes the subject of photography? Is there a preconceived idea of what needs to be captured in order to create a mother? What do we cut out or exclude in the framing of the perfect shot in order to affirm the ideal motherhood of our imaginations? Are certain images excluded from the family album if they fail to accord with this ideal?
Confronted by this archive I had to remind myself that I wasn’t attempting a study on motherhood within the medium of photography; I simply wanted to test out my questions on motherhood using photography as a medium. But whenever I attempted to write I would lose my way.
The metaphor of the “hidden,” “effaced,” or “voluntarily excluded” mother helped me circumvent these general questions, for all that they were important in their own right. I realized that it was the hidden mother who preoccupied me and that I was only able to address this vast archive through the prism of my question: If I am unable to see my mother in her portrait, what is it I see when I look at the mothers in the archive? Can I truly see other people’s mothers?
***
Among the pictures that caught my eye was the image of a seven-month-pregnant Demi Moore on the cover of the August 1991 Vanity Fair. There have been many readings of this image that treat it as shocking, not because she is naked but because she is naked and pregnant. Part of its impact derives from the incompatibility of two elements within the dominant narrative: the erotic vs. the pregnant woman. This is what captures our attention, makes us give it another look: she is the archetype of the instrumental mother. But the picture is too idiosyncratic; it defeats my ability to establish a connection. There isn’t a chink for me to slip through, a single detail that draws me in: there is perfection, and it is this perfection, maybe, that renders it one-dimensional.
Furthermore, it is one of those images that quickly become the subject of imitations. Fashionable. At first, celebrity women, photographers, and magazines contribute to its reproduction, then the naked pregnant woman becomes a theme, and with time it is no longer limited to celebrity actresses and celebrated beauties but becomes a rite of passage, a souvenir image no different from photos of graduations or weddings.
When I look at Demi Moore, pregnant and naked, I confront the intentions of the “operator” behind the camera: her message, the harmony she has composed from the constituent elements of the picture. The photographer is Annie Leibovitz and to me she is far more important than Demi Moore here. Not because she is—as Michele Pridmore-Brown has written—the chronicler of shocking scenes that have disrupted society, the church, and conservative critics, pushed limits, broken taboos, and destabilized notions of the beautiful, the outré, and the poignant. And not because (as many magazine articles have asserted) the image contains any specific message that might compel people of influence in Hollywood to accept the natural life cycle of an actress and her right to bear children. Rather, it is because the photographer aspires to more: from lighting and angles and the unclothed pregnant body she seeks to fashion an icon.
I am not interested in engaging with the mother as icon nor am I amazed to find that it can be achieved. The truth is that when I look at the picture of Demi Moore I ask myself, “How do other mothers appear to their children?” I often wonder if they seem ghostly, hidden, absent in the way my mother does in the only picture of her that I have and which is before me now. How does Moore’s daughter, who must be twenty-five by now, see her mother? Does she recognize the woman posed before the camera playing a role: actress, celebrity, feminist, disruptor, et cetera?
Annie Leibovitz, the celebrity photographer who took the picture of Demi Moore in 1991, took a second photograph in 2001, a self-portrait, also pregnant and naked. In the decade between the two, the image of a naked pregnant woman has lost the same capacity to shock. Leibovitz created the icon and others imitated her. But Leibovitz’s self-portrait is shocking for other reasons. To Pridmore-Brown, this image confronted the public with queer motherhood. It rejected age limits or, to put it another way, it destabilized and deconstructed the limits and binaries associated with making a family. Over and above this, Pridmore-Brown celebrates the image’s liberating potential for all women in its redrawing of the limits of age and gender.
An image in black and white: Leibovitz pregnant at fifty-one, her wrinkles evident. Unlike Moore, she is not facing the lens, but has her head turned in three-quarter profile. It is a late pregnancy, the pregnancy of an artist who hasn’t had time before and now, at last, has decided to experience it for herself. Just as the dominant narrative was dealt a shock by the beauty of a pregnant Moore, it is shocked again by the pregnancy of the aging naked body, the menopausal pregnancy, a divergence from conventional pregnancy, which is associated with a specific biological age. More than that, Leibovitz is in front of the camera, not behind it as she usually is.
I first saw this picture in her book A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005, a photographic narration of Leibovitz’s relationship with Susan Sontag over the course of fifteen years: the places they visited together such as Jordan and Egypt; a picture of Sontag in bed with her typewriter; another of her receiving chemotherapy.
The book does not address a lesbian relationship but a friendship. The images of Sontag dying were taken by Leibovitz, while Sontag took the picture of a pregnant Leibovitz. So the book tells the story of two women who lived with one another for fifteen years in a relationship that remains uncategorized, one of them seventy years old and soon to die, the other in her fifties and about to give birth, and the primary medium of this narrative is the camera.
It is not just the narrative contextualizing Leibovitz’s pregnant picture that brings me back to examine it again and again. There is something painful in the daylight coming from the window to her right, in the white of the bedsheet and the glasses carelessly thrown down on it, as though Leibovitz or Sontag had removed them at the last moment before taking their positions in front of the camera and behind it.
As though the glasses are Barthes’s punctum. They are the detail that speaks to me, affects me mysteriously, pricks me, that possesses the capacity to extend and grow. Looking again at the abandoned glasses makes me think about resistance to death in the picture: the aging, pregnant body defying its biological limits; the ailing Sontag fighting against her own death that, though it isn’t the subject of this image, is present in all the images that surround it and is with her, too, as she stands hidden behind the lens.
Despite the differences between the two images, Leibovitz’s self-portrait seems to touch on one aspect of the absence that I perceived in my mother’s picture. The very absence that I failed to detect in the image of Demi Moore. Which is why, for me, it remained a one-dimensional picture, incapable of “pricking” me.
It is not simply the absence of Sontag behind the camera, or Leibovitz’s gaze directed towards her, or the glasses tossed down deliberately or thoughtlessly upon the bedsheet; it is also the daughter who will emerge from Leibovitz’s womb and the way she will subsequently regard her mother in the image. I can only imagine that she will see her as a ghost. As though what provokes us and prompts us to take another look at a picture that is neither ours nor concerns us (i.e., looking at other mothers) is both conditional on, and shaped by, the history of our relationship with our mother’s image in our album. In other words, to establish a relationship with other people’s mothers requires us to engage with what we have learned by staring at images of our own.
***
What is it you see, or don’t see, in a picture of a mother who belongs to you? Put another way, how do you see your mother in her picture? Is she visible and clear; can you truly grasp her? Do you see her differently because she carries with her a history or memories or a weight or details that others will not see as they page through your family album, or press “like” on Facebook or Instagram simply because the image is “beautiful” or “amusing” or “comprehensible”?
The response to questions such as these will be as various as the individuals who answer them, but why do I assume that it is always easy to find our mothers in their portraits? Is it not possible that the history and memories and details we share with them are a burden, functioning as a sheet or curtain that hides them from us? Isn’t knowledge—as per the dictum of early medieval Arab mystic al-Niffari—a veil?
Roland Barthes questioned what he knew about photography, and his answer was as follows:
I observed that a photograph can be the object of three practices (or of three emotions, or of three intentions): to do, to undergo, to look. The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs—in magazines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives . . . And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.
Following Barthes a step further I would suggest that, as you look at an image of yours, an image of motherhood that concerns you personally, you are neither operator nor spectator, you are not the child in the photograph nor the mother that holds the child on her lap. You are the relationship that links you both, the relationship that is erased or hidden or even excluded from the picture itself.
Your portrait with your mother is a moment, a moment entangled with your personal narrative about her: the liminal stage of unity and separation from when you were inside her, then your birth, then the love or conflict or parting (or whatever it may be) that follows.
In images from the dominant narrative we confront the mothers of other people: conspicuous, clear, standardized, comprehensible. In their portraits, our mothers cannot be standardized or banal. And though images of the instrumentalized mother can provoke us to take another look or even stare at times (the image’s symbolism, the presence of an accompanying narrative, its oddity), our mothers require a journey in the opposite direction if they are to be seen.
It is a journey towards what has been excluded from the image, what it has failed to hold, what cannot be given or displayed within the frame. In other words, “my mother,” in her picture, cannot be standardized or banal, visible or invisible. I know that, in that moment, she was there before the lens, spectrum and spectacle, but my knowledge of her outside the frame conceals her from me. Unlike those mothers hidden behind a sheet or curtain it is not easy to find her outline. She requires a journey inside, a journey to save her from becoming a ghost or a silhouette, to save her from the absence that is the proposition of every image.
Adapted from Motherhood and Its Ghosts, translated by Robin Moger, to be published by Transit Books this month.
Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet, essayist, translator, and literary scholar. She is the author of five books of Arabic poetry, selections from which have been translated into numerous languages. The Threshold, translated into English by Robyn Creswell, was shortlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize and won the 2023 National Translation Award in Poetry. She is the recipient of the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Literature for Traces of Enayat, published by Transit Books.
Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic living in Barcelona. He has translated poetry and prose, including Haytham El Wardany’s The Book of Sleep and Mohamed Kheir’s Slipping.