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Podcast: New Books in Art
Episode: Laura Larson, “Hidden Mother” (Saint Lucy Press, 2017)
Description: Hidden Mother by Laura Larson was published by Saint Lucy Press (January 2017), with 96 pages and 26 Color and black and white images.
Hidden Mother tells the story of the adoption of Larson’s daughter from Ethiopia as mapped through nineteenth-century hidden mother photographs. The term “hidden mother” refers to the widespread but little-known practice in 19th-century portrait photography of concealing a mother’s body as she supported and calmed her child during the lengthy exposures demanded by early photographic technology. In the final portrait of the child, the mother–often covered from head-to-toe in a black drop cloth–appears as a...