Maggs Bros.

The tintype photographic process was portable and less expensive than its predecessors like daguerrotype, and as such made photography accessible to a wider swathe of society than ever. Particularly popular in America, entrepreneurial travelling photographers developed a range of tricks for achieving the relatively long exposures required to capture a positive image. These included head rests for adult subjects, but for infants a more creative solution was settled upon. The baby’s mother, or nurse or assistant, was seated on a chair and fully draped in cloth, in order to provide support and comfort to the child without also appearing in the final photograph. This resulted in a convention known colloquially as “hidden mother photography”.