The mother who is never in the photos
In many families, the person taking the photographs is the one missing from them. On mothers, cameras and the quiet decision to stay out of frame.
Scroll back through almost any family’s phone and a pattern appears. Children blowing out candles. Children asleep in car seats. A dog wearing a paper crown. Grandparents at the head of a table, photographed from the far end of it. A beach, a first day at school, a lopsided cake. And somewhere in all of it, if you look carefully, the mother: a hand steadying a bike, a shoulder at the edge of the frame, a reflection in a darkened window, holding the phone.
She was at every one of those moments. The pictures say otherwise.
Two reasons for one absence
Some of it is simply the job. Somebody has to take the photographs, and in a great many households that somebody is the mother. When the geographer Gillian Rose studied family photography for her book Doing Family Photography, she interviewed mothers of young children, and found the family’s pictures — taken, sorted, shared and displayed — woven into the everyday work of mothering itself. The camera is one more thing she carries, alongside the snacks and the spare socks and the knowledge of who is allergic to what.
But the job is also a very good hiding place. Holding the camera means never having to be in front of it, and nobody asks why. It is the most socially acceptable way there is to disappear.
Because there is a second reason, and it tends to travel in disguise. Not today, my hair’s a mess. Get one of just the kids. I’ll be in the next one. Delete that, I look awful. For many women it is not the lighting they are avoiding but their bodies — the weight gained in pregnancy and never quite lost, the weight gained later for a dozen other reasons, the body that no longer matches the one in the wedding album. The camera becomes something she will step in front of later, once the body has been corrected.
Treating your life as a waiting room until a different body arrives has costs everywhere, but the photographs are where that cost is most permanent, because most other postponements can be made up later. A missing photograph cannot.
What the gap says without saying anything
Children are paying attention to far more than we give them credit for. They notice who is always in the pictures and who never is. They notice the mother who ducks out of the group shot, who asks to see every picture and then asks for it to be deleted, who says not me with a small grimace.
There is research on how directly this kind of modelling can land. In an experiment published in 2018, researchers asked mothers to make negative comments about their own appearance and eating in front of their preadolescent daughters. Afterwards, the girls reported more dissatisfaction with their own bodies. The study was about spoken comments, not photographs. But a mother who flinches away from every camera is making a comment too — a quiet, repeated one, about which bodies deserve to be seen.
That is the part I find hardest to set down. The absence is meant to protect the mother from an image she dislikes. What it teaches her children, especially her daughters, is that a woman whose body has changed should remove herself from the record.
The archive is a story, and she has written herself out of it
Family photographs are not neutral documents. Rose’s research makes the point that they are idealised on purpose — nobody photographs the bathroom being cleaned or the tantrum in the supermarket — and the mothers she spoke to knew this and were content with it. The album is the story a family chooses to keep about itself.
Which means that a mother who is never photographed is not merely missing from some pictures. She is missing from the version of events her family will one day hold as the truth. The birthday parties will be remembered as the children’s. The holidays will be remembered as the places. Her work will be everywhere in those pictures, and she will be almost nowhere.
Years later, her children will go looking for her in those albums. I would rather they found her.
Being in them without loving them
None of this requires liking the photographs. You are not being asked to feel beautiful on command. Being in the picture and looking the way you want to in the picture are two separate projects, and only the first one is urgent.
The practical side is not complicated: hand the phone to someone else, ask a teenager to take over as the family photographer, use a timer, stop deleting. There is more on that in a piece about the photographs your children will want. The harder part is the decision underneath it, which is that the person who keeps the family’s memories is entitled to be part of them.
So the next time someone offers to take one of you all together, don’t reach for the phone. Hand it over. Stand in the middle, where you have been all along.
Sources
- Rose G. Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, the Public and the Politics of Sentiment. Ashgate, 2010 (Routledge).
- Handford CM, Rapee RM, Fardouly J. The influence of maternal modeling on body image concerns and eating disturbances in preadolescent girls. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 2018.
