I know that I just had a post on vintage photos the other day and I don’t usually like to have similar posts too close to one another but I found these photos too interesting to not mention here. They are called Hidden Mother photos and come from the Victorian era of studio photography. They are photos of small children taken with their mother holding them while she is under a drape of some sort. The photo is then matted with a window that crops out the mother so that the drape appears as a backdrop for the child. In present times, these photos, now without their mats to expose the whole photo, have become very collectible. What was intended to be a sweet image of a toddler now has a ghostly figure cradling a child, giving it a strange and slightly creepy feel that appeals to collectors. Some are a little creepier than others. Just found these interesting…
Redtree Times 
These are creepy. But now I wonder about a photo I have of my mother when she was about six months old. It was taken in a studio in a town not so very far from the one shown above from Schaller, Iowa. I’ve always assumed the background was a drapery hung from some sort of ring, cascading down. Now, I’m not so sure. I’ll have to dig it out and take another look.
My mother did a fair bit of work on our family history. Getting birth certificates and so forth, she discovered that in Victorian England the name of the mother gradually disappeared entirely from the record so that by the mid-19th century babies were born to “John Smith and wife.” Somehow these photographs remind me of that. Creepy indeed.