A French woman’s question on Twitter—“Mothers: does anyone ever take *your* picture?”—has prompted a larger conversation about the representation of mothers in family photos.
In the Victorian era, mothers weren’t exactly doing it for the ’gram, but they still had to work for the photographs they wanted. The long exposures required by old-school cameras meant that young children needed to be kept still for considerable periods of time. Studio photographers enlisted mothers as literal supports, camouflaging them in sheets and drapes so that they could prop up their offspring inconspicuously.
“I thought, Hey, that’s weird. I’m not in the photos very much,” Vallet recalled. “So I said, ‘O.K., I’m going to count.’ I work on the representation of girls and boys in kids’ books, so I sort of have that habit.” She found that she appeared in ten per cent of the four hundred and fifty photos in the album, whereas her husband figured in twenty. She was present mostly in premeditated “ritualized photos” but nowhere to be found in the spontaneous everyday ones .
Selfies are a common countermeasure to the problem of being disappeared from a family’s future memories—so are friendly bystanders , paid professionals , and one’s own children . A. Rochaun, a writer who covers motherhood,of her “heartbreak” at finding very few images of herself amid “nearly a thousand images of the children and their father, and even the dog.” She told me that, since then, she’d become more proactive.
Hirsch hypothesized that the discrepancies Vallet and other mothers had noticed might actually reflect the evolution of gender roles rather than serving as proof of their stagnation. “It’s to show that this is really happening, that fathers are taking care of kids, and that family structures are changing—or that they want to make it seem as though they had,” she said. “Family photos perform a certain vision of the family that we want to promote and disseminate.
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