“Mother and Daughter”
William Shew
c. 1845-1850
Holding Secrets
I first came across this photograph (a daguerreotype) in John Szarkowski’s Looking at Photographs. 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1973.) He has this to say about it: “An original daguerreotype is a small picture, generally smaller than the palm of one’s hand, and exists on a surface of highly polished silver. The image, though infinitely detailed and subtle, is elusive. The picture should be looked at with its case not fully opened, preferably in private and by lamplight, as one would approach a secret” (14).
It’s a nice touch, and a tantalizing suggestion, that we should look at Shew’s photo “with its case not fully opened, preferably in private and by lamplight, as one would approach a secret.” It’s a tempered entreaty that we tread lightly and with respect. But strip away the niceties of his wording — and his words are nice — and I’m left with a bad feeling in my gut, a feeling that, no matter how cautiously and considerately I might proceed, any “looking” that I might do (“peeking” is probably the better word here) is necessarily invasive.
I wonder. The mother-daughter duo are clearly tight-lipped, and beyond the boundaries of the daguerreotype and its silver case, perhaps they’re taciturn as well, finding strength in the holding some secret, a secret for which the daughter serves as Praetorian Guard, her massive right hand engulfing her mother’s left as if to say “Don’t worry, mother. I’m here. I’ve got this. Your secret is safe.” Together with her more than almost masculine hands, the daughter’s erect posture and broad shoulders impart defiance, while the mother, her shoulders perhaps weary with the burden of age or the burden of secrets kept (could there be more than one?) holds her head at an odd tilt that would seem to say “You heard what my daughter said.”
And what, really, can we do at this point? The answer, of course, is that we can do nothing. Nothing but look and wonder. Any secrets that might have been (and there are always secrets) have long since gone to the grave, where they become ghosts and the stuff of imagination.
