Photographer
Anne Geddes has had a long and prolific career, but she is perhaps best known
for “Down in the Garden,” a 1996 coffee-table book featuring tiny babies
adorably (or tweely, depending on your perspective) tucked into unlikely
horticultural scenarios, as if they’re hiding by chance in someone’s flower
bed.
اضافة اعلان
Perhaps you’ve
seen these images online, or on a mug or greeting card or calendar: the
sleeping newborns snuggling into tiny pea pods, as if they are so many peas
themselves; the babies wearing mouse outfits and dozing in old boots; the
babies-as-butterflies, hedgehogs, cabbages, gnomes, worms, bumblebees, flowers.
There was a
time when a new book by Geddes, 64, who has been called “the world’s most
famous baby photographer,” could sell many millions of copies; at the height of
her fame, she was interviewed by Oprah. But the internet, Photoshopping,
cellphones, the transformation of parental Instagram accounts into virtual
photo galleries, the flooding of images online — all those conspired to dampen
her old business model. In the past few years, Geddes has focused more on
studio work, commissions for companies and private clients and campaigns for
charities like the March of Dimes.
Then the
pandemic hit. Marooned at home in New York with her husband, Kel, her work on
hold, her mind turning in on herself, Geddes found herself — along with the
rest of the world — considering larger questions. When so much is stripped
away, what is important? How do you find hope amid so much fear and loss? How
can artists on pause turn their creativity to something else?
Between
them, she and Kel have four adult daughters — all scattered on different
continents these days — and a suggestion from one of them led her to what
became her pandemic project, called, simply, “Joy.” The idea was
straightforward: solicit baby photographs from parents around the world, in a
sort of open casting call, so that Geddes could post them in her own Instagram
stories. “I guarantee I will look at all of them, and I will like all of them,”
she posted in a video message.
The
responses poured in. Newborns, babies, toddlers, the occasional older child,
siblings hugging each other, hundreds and hundreds of photos from 80-plus
countries — from France, from Kazakhstan, from Britain, from Saudi Arabia, from
Russia, from Iran, from Poland, from Singapore, from India, from Papua New
Guinea — and counting. They seemed like postcards from the past, or perhaps
from the future. They seemed like glimpses not only of joy, but of hope.
“The
messages were all the same,” Geddes said in a video interview. “One mother
said, ‘I’m sending you my heart.’ “
An early
post featured an infant boy named Mason — 3 months old, a resident of Canada —
wearing a Minions outfit. “At the moment we are all one heartbeat,” Geddes
wrote in the accompanying caption. “Collective joy around the world is what we
all need right now.”
From
Monaghan, Ireland, a new mother named Sarah Bond sent a photo of her daughter,
Heidi, born in November of 2019 and only a few months old when the world locked
down. New babies are gifts; Heidi’s arrival was especially precious for Bond,
who was 42 when she gave birth and had been trying for more than a decade to
become pregnant.
“I was in
this bubble of pure joy, and that is probably why I sent in her picture; I had
never felt anything like that before,” she said. Unable to see her parents or
her in-laws or much of anyone outside her immediate family, she felt that being
included made her part of the wider world. “I just thought it was very generous
of her to give her time like that,” she said, of Geddes.
It can be
lonely to give birth in a pandemic, a time when the normal support system that
surrounds a new parent — the friends who drop by with gifts and encouragement,
the strangers who coo at your baby in the street, the grandparents who babysit
— isn’t available.
“One of the
things I’ve thought about is there are all these little babies who were born
last year and into this year who don’t go on play dates,” Geddes said. “I was
standing on a street corner waiting for the walk sign and there is a little
baby sitting in a stroller and she’s 6 or 7 months old, and everybody around
her is wearing a mask and I though, ‘This is what she thinks humans look like.’
“Geddes, who is from Australia, more or less backed into her vocation. After a
stint in public relations, she picked up a camera for the first time at 25 and
got a job in a photography studio in Melbourne.
She and Kel,
a television executive, moved to New Zealand in 1988. When a magazine editor used
one of her images of a child in a big editorial spread, her career took off,
she said, and soon she became a go-to children’s portraitist. She published her
first calendar in 1992. She began setting aside a day each month in which to
let her imagination run free with her favorite subject: babies.
“Photographing
small children is challenging and exhausting, but you can get the most gorgeous
images from the most difficult children,” she said. In those heady
pre-Photoshop days, she spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building
elaborate sets — the outfits, the pea pods, the toadstools, the flowerpots, the
accouterments, you name it — and countless time engineering how to get the
babies to do what she wanted.
For
instance, for a photograph of Rhys and Grant, a pair of plump twins dressed as
cabbages, the challenge was to get them to settle down, stop crying and/or
grizzling (or sleeping) and join in the spirit of the photo shoot.
“You have
6-to-7-month-olds in the studio and I’m thinking, ‘how do I get them to look at
each other when there’s so much happening?’ “ she said. She had an assistant
run a balloon on a string past them, and then pull it away at the opportune
moment, when each twin’s gaze rested in the other’s direction.
“The thing
with a baby is everything needs to revolve around them,” she said. “You bring a
newborn home — and the newborn is the ultimate diva in your house.”
With the
commercial aspects of her profession changing so rapidly, Geddes has had to
seek more creative ways of making money. She sells limited-edition prints of
her work online and is developing an app that will help people organize, store
and share their photographs. Another project still in development would allow
people to take photographs of their babies and insert them into classic Anne
Geddes scenarios — inside a pea pod, for instance.
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