What is Birth Photography?
Updated: Apr 2, 2022
If I'm meeting someone new or making small talk and someone asks me about my job, I get blank stares, uncomfortable silence or just plain confusion most of the time.
After all, why would anyone want pictures of THAT? It's private, it's messy, it's scary, it's just not something we want to hear much about in general.
I'm hoping to change this
This year, I entered the Birth Photographers Contest. I do not believe I'm at the same skill set as some of my fellow amazing artists (not yet anyways), but I want to help normalize the idea of CELEBRATING this day. We take pictures of other big events, why not memorialize the day we meet our children: the minute we see their face, count all their toes and kiss their fuzzy heads?
This Years Winner: "A Touch of Love" by: Barbara Aviz Brazil
Another reason I feel birth photography is so needed is to help us unlearn many of our current beliefs. It's not our fault, but most of us have all been raised in a culture that mostly fears and shames a very normal life process. In our conversations, birth is mostly negative and in our media, birth is shown in a very scary and unrealistic way. It creates a lot of self doubt and anxiety for pregnant people and future parents. This attitude has also lead to the overmedicalization of birth, contributing to the maternal health crisis in our country. When we believe birth is meant to be a medical emergency and that pregnancy is a disease, it leads to greater rates of unnecessary interventions and complications.
We need to see examples of healthy and joyful birth.
I often think about the impact it would have had on me as a young pregnant person to have access to positive birth images and stories. My awareness and confidence would have been so different if I had ever heard or seen anything that gave me any bit of trust in my body or the process. It's a hard pill to swallow. But I'm grateful for how I have grown and learned and now I want to be part of helping the next generation of parents.
Birth photography is doing a lot to help us see that birth is a normal and healthy event and a day in your life that deserves the same time, attention and investment that we give to other important milestones. You can have an experience that is informed, positive and beautiful. It can be a day that you will WANT to relive again and again.
If you are giving birth near Chapel Hill, Raleigh or Durham, I would love to be part of the team. Get in touch today!
Go here to view more beautiful and positive images and see all the category winners!