ABSTRACT
Any re-imagining of photography’s history must necessarily entail a closer examination of particular poses and genres of pose, especially those that are repeated over and over again. A 2013 installation by the Italian artist Linda Fregni Nagler, titled The Hidden Mother, presented 1,000 such pictures, each of them repeating some variant of this same gesture. The formulaic repetitions of pose and gesture that the people find in most photographs, and especially in these "hidden mother" examples, thus link them to this ancient pre-photographic phenomenon. One 1967 film of a sacred Fire Ceremony featured a number of older men with a specialised knowledge of the ceremony. Ironically, in making herself invisible at the time of the photograph's initial exposure, a hidden mother makes the inequity of her subject position all the more visible to the reader today, and therefore available for our recognition and critique.
