I then walked from her desk to my desk, sat down, turned to my work table and picked up the next item in the stack of Logan material which happened to be an early cabinet card face down. I told her I was pretty sure we did not have any in our collection–that perhaps they dated earlier than most of our photos. When I came back to the work room, Betsy was there scanning, and I asked her if she knew about hidden mother photographs. I had spent about an hour separating the material and then dashed off to work on the circulation desk for an hour. The box contained a mix of 1880s era photographs, small family snapshots from the 1940s, folded newspapers, early letters of correspondence, condolence cards, clipped obituaries, school diplomas, calling cards–a good mix of about eight decades of family keepsakes. That was on a Saturday, and when I came back to work on Monday, I picked up where I had left off going through the last box of material that Gary Logan (MS242) had loaned to us to scan. The general idea is that during the Victorian era, exposure time was longer (how long in 1894 I don’t know), which made it very hard to get a photograph of babies, so photographers would often hide mothers behind curtains or other materials so that the mother could hold the baby from behind, keeping it still and calm. At the end of our conversation, she asked me if I had heard of “hidden mother” photographs, which I had not, but started looking up on the Internet while she was telling me about them. It is the kind of thing that has to be pointed out to you, and then a whole new world opens up. I had not paid much attention to them in the past, nor read about them.
![victorian portraits victorian portraits](http://cdn.historydaily.org/content/52791/f3f9e7b2f9a8fa12ea6c4f32c62922a9.jpg)
![victorian portraits victorian portraits](https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/1/victorian-portrait-maciej-mackiewicz.jpg)
I was recently talking with our North Carolina Room volunteer, Lynne Poirier-Wilson about different props and painted backdrops used by nineteenth century photographers.