Mention baby photography anywhere in the world, and Anne Geddes’ name is likely to surface. The Australian native who lives in New York City has created countless cute and elaborately staged photos of newborns and small children that have appeared worldwide in calendars, greeting cards, and books for over three decades….ny
“I love children’s books. Some of them are so beautiful and last for generations, and it’s an art form illustrating and writing a children’s book. Our girls were at that age when we would read them children’s books all the time….ny
“I gradually got into doing some work for myself after ten years of photographing babies and two-year-olds. It’s hard work, but it’s joyful work, and it isn’t easy. I used to do two portrait sittings a day, five days a week, and after eight or nine years, I was starting to think that I needed some creative time for myself where you’re not photographing for a client, where they’re not smiling or blah, blah.
“So, to keep my sanity, once a month, I spent a day creating something just for me, and one of the first two images I did was of babies in cabbages. There’s a black and white image of a baby called Joshua hanging from a hook [wrapped] in some fabric. It’s a beautiful black-and-white image. I remember looking at it in the dark room and thinking; I really love this. And I don’t have to worry about what anybody else thinks. And so, it sort of started, and it was in the storybook genre.
“Down in the Garden was so successful, but the greeting cards and calendars came before it. I started to do 10 or 12 images, and people would say, ‘You should do a calendar.’ The elaborate staging of a lot of it came from being creative in producing greeting cards where you know you must do Christmas themes, Valentine’s Day, or Mother’s and Father’s Day.
“Then it led into Down in the Garden, and as any author would tell you, when you’re producing your work, writing your book or your play or your musical score or me photographing this book, you have no concept of how people are going to react to it. I had always resented that.”
Geddes (born 1956), who considers herself a storyteller, set Down in the Garden as a children’s story because that’s where she was going with all these little characters. Her tiny baby models were photographed as fairies, gnomes, sunflowers, water lilies, field mice, ladybugs, and peas in a pod in this magical and fun-filled book.
One of the reasons for its success is the images. She’s had a little baby sitting on the studio floor kissing photos of the babies in the book, but an adult sense of humor also went through there. It was wide-reaching in terms of the way people responded to it.
Next, Oprah Winfrey invited her to her show, which was when she had a book club. Geddes had never watched Oprah’s show because she lived in New Zealand at the time, and it was a daytime show.
On the show, Oprah’s carried out two little newborn babies in bumblebee outfits and did the interview. At the end of the interview, she picked up Down in the Garden and said, “This is the best coffee table book I’ve seen this year.” The book then shot right up New York Times bestseller list and took Geddes by surprise.
“I think I got pocketed [after that] a little bit within that genre, and for years I couldn’t look at the book again because I knew that I was more than that, but I hadn’t produced anything to demonstrate that,” remembers Geddes. “Kel, [husband, marketing guru, and TV executive] said, ‘You’ve got to lead your audience.’
“I said I want to do the next book, something so simple and pure. The third book Pure was what I wanted to do. But he was correct in that ‘It’s too much of a change. You’ve got to meet them halfway,’ So, my second book contained some of my most simple and classic imagery and images from the Garden book. It had some nudity, so we launched it in Europe, where they don’t bat an eyelid for much of that.”
“Even here in New York, where I shoot, you go into a blank space on the day of a shoot or a setup date and create everything out of nothing,” Geddes says. “You just bring it all together and create that world, and then it gets dismantled, and you go away. That space is a sense of possibility in my mind, possibly because I’m a Virgo, because we like control.
“For the first ten years of my career, which took me from Sydney to Melbourne to Auckland in New Zealand, I did exclusively private portraiture of families, especially children. I love little kids, as they always have this sense of promise. They’re like an open book, and the more I photographed younger and younger children, the more I wondered how beautiful they were and how exquisite a newborn baby is because of everything they represent. They are us at the very beginning of our lives. Nothing good or bad has happened to them; they’re just pure.
“There’s no meanness, there’s guileless, there are little babies, and it’s only what we instill in them as they’re growing older that they become different people. My work is about promise and the Miracle of New Life.”
Babies Are Not Suitable Subjects?
Geddes won a competition with Agfa to go to Photokina in Germany and went with Kel. Afterward, they went to London with 30 prints as examples of her work to meet various publishers before Down in the Garden.
“We went to one place to see whether people get what we were doing or not,” says Geddes. “I had a huge hurdle as well because of the subject matter. When I first proposed doing a calendar, one of the publishers said there were so many baby calendars. And I went to look and couldn’t find any. This concept of the baby is so cute and funny. Calendars [people think] are everywhere, but they aren’t.
“We went to another publisher who said to me, ‘If I can give you some advice, just photographing babies is never going to work for you.’ And then the next meeting we went to was Athena [British fine art printer], who got the whole thing, and I remember sitting in the boardroom outside London, and they had spread all my photos on their boardroom table and said, this is fantastic we want the worldwide rights to all of this. [They did not hand over all their work as they wanted it spread out amongst different publishers.]
“Another publisher said, ‘You need to broaden your portfolio. Babies are just never going to work. You need to have some adults, animals, and…Even the art and gallery market don’t think it’s cool to have imagery of babies. They don’t think babies are a viable project.
“I won a competition for the annual New Zealand Institute of Professional Photographers print competition in the portrait section. I nearly got Champion print, but I didn’t. At the time, the head of Kodak in New Zealand came up to me and said, ‘Thank God you didn’t win. How could we have a baby on the boardroom wall at Kodak?’
“Other photographers, men, would ask me what kind of work I did. And I’m like, ‘I photograph babies.’ I wish there was another way to say it that sounds different, but it’s what I do, right? And they would invariably say, ‘I used to do that when I was first starting out,’ with the implication that then they went on to something more important like landscapes or fashion. I was always puzzled by that attitude, but now I’m used to it.”
Photographing a Baby Session
Geddes was shooting a series of twelve Signs of the Zodiac. She put a notice on Facebook saying: “Anne is shooting in New York City. If you’re pregnant and your baby is due around this time or if your baby will be six-to-seven months old at that time…”
Six-to-seven-month-old babies sit confidently, but they can’t crawl and get out of the set.
When photographing babies, it is important to understand that everything must revolve around them. To have one baby in an image, Geddes would have three newborns at the studio because babies have no respect for photographers, and if a baby doesn’t want to do something, that’s just fine.
“By the time I’m shooting in the studio, 90% of the work has already been done. The styling and setting up the lighting is already done,” says the baby photographer. “You have to be very simple when you’re dealing with babies. You don’t try to do too much with the baby.
“Babies are the ultimate ego in the room, so 90% of the arrangements must already be done. You have to make sure that wherever the babies are, it is very comfortable for them, and it’s not intimidating. You don’t take very long and just keep pushing and pushing. Sometimes it’s just a few minutes, and you’ve got what you want. That’s in the planning before the imagery. I don’t do my own Photoshop and work with somebody who does that.
“You can put so much work into a set, and people look at it and go, ‘Oh look, that baby’s so cute, and you feel like saying there are six months of work that went into everything behind the scenes.”
Some calendar shoots involve travel. When Geddes was in New Zealand, she had to travel to the US to photograph African American babies because, at the time, it was almost impossible to find a single African American baby in New Zealand.
Calendars Are No Longer Financially Viable
Producing and photographing a calendar is expensive, costing $200,000 to $300,000 on average. It depends on how much propping is involved. The Signs of the Zodiac had hand-painted backgrounds, which were very intricate.
