Still Holding Still

Sarah Vanagt compiled this collection of truly odd photos of children and babies, taken recently using a 19th-century photographic practice known as Invisible Mothers. Photographer Jeroen de Wijs employs a technique from Victorian times, back when taking a photograph of your child was a complex enterprise – an exceptional event that could easily fail. Capturing an image required a 30-second shutter time, and it was almost impossible to get an entire family perfectly still for that long. So photographers came up with a little trick to get around that problem. They got the mother to sit cloaked from head to toe in a blanket so that she could keep her child quiet while not appearing in the picture herself. But the mothers aren’t entirely invisible. In fact they are rather spooky apparitions, looming behind their expressionless children. In her film, Vanagt uses the long exposure times to “enter into” De Wijs’s photos of children.