What are maternity portraits actually for?
I’ve photographed maternity for years and it’s always been part of what I do; but if I’m truthful I’ve never really talked very much about why I believe it matters.
Recently I’ve been looking closely at the photography industry, how people choose a photographer and, inevitably, what happens to professional photography in a world where AI can create an increasingly convincing photograph of someone who never stood in front of a camera at all and it brought me back to a deceptively simple question.
What are maternity portraits actually for?
If their only purpose is to create a beautiful photograph of somebody while they’re pregnant, I think that’s becoming a much harder proposition to defend.
We can make people look extraordinary – of course we can, that’s part of the skill of being a professional photographer, but I don’t think that’s the reason to do it.
In fact, I’ve always been slightly uncomfortable with the idea that maternity photography should involve transforming someone into an almost unrecognisable version of themselves.
The elaborate styling, professional hair and make-up; the idea that somehow we need to manufacture a more glamorous version of the woman standing in front of us before she’s worthy of being photographed.
There’s absolutely a place for that style of photography and plenty of people love it, but it’s just never been what this is about for me. I want someone to look at their maternity portraits years later and recognise themself and be confident to realise: –
Good grief I looked amazing.
She wasn’t transformed into somebody else for a day, she was actually her.
There’s another slant to this; I’ve realised that the most important person who may eventually look at those portraits isn’t necessarily the person I photographed.
It’s the child who hasn’t been born yet.
We tend to talk about a baby’s story as though it begins when they’re born, but anyone who has waited and wished for a baby knows that isn’t really true; long before you know their face, you start to know them.
You know when they’re awake and you’ll recognise the particular wriggle they seem to do every evening that ends up exactly where that foot likes to lodge itself!
Perhaps they go wild when they hear a particular voice or their older brother or sister talks to the bump. Their little character is often already decided because apparently bedtime is when they’ve chosen to start the party.
Families are already making memories with somebody they haven’t technically met.
The relationship doesn’t begin at birth, so why should the story we photograph begin there?
That’s the bit I think we’ve sometimes lost when talking about maternity photography, it isn’t just about documenting what somebody looked like when they were pregnant. It’s about documenting that somebody was already here.
They’ve already got their space in the family, and are a part of everyday conversation – a little foot or hand saying errrr “hello everyone” is making the family laugh. The hours spent wondering about who they are and who they are going to look like just shows how much they are already being celebrated, and the one thing every child needs to know is they were deeply wanted and loved from the very beginning.
So, with all this thinking I feel quite strongly that maternity shouldn’t need newborn photography to give it a purpose.
For years, maternity has often been bundled alongside newborn photography, as though it’s the preliminary chapter before the main event and I hold my hands up, I’ve been guilty of allowing it to sit too quietly alongside newborn; but it’s never really reflected the way I’ve photographed I and I’ve always loved that it was a chapter is complete in its own right.
Then there was the light bulb moment, whatever comes afterwards belongs in that time and the maternity portraits are about this time.
Maternity isn’t the chapter before the story begins
Maternity is to celebrate the person carrying the baby and their partner who will already have their own relationship with them, and if this is not your fist the children waiting to become brothers and sisters.
It’s about your family as it exists at this precise point in your story, with your baby right in the middle of all of it.
That’s also why I think physical portraits matter in maternity, just imagine growing up with one of those portraits in your home. It won’t be apparent immediately but one day your little baby who is still a bump will realise.
That’s me – that’s my mum carrying me – that’s my dad talking to me – that’s my brother with his hand on me. Wow they were waiting for me and here I was before anyone even knew my face.
I think there’s something profoundly reassuring in being able to see evidence of your own place in a family before you can possibly remember it for yourself.
I believe every child should grow up knowing how much they were wanted and loved from the very beginning and that’s what maternity photography has always meant to me.
The experience itself hasn’t suddenly changed and I haven’t reinvented how I photograph maternity, but ping I’ve finally given it its own proper place and, perhaps more importantly, found the words to explain why I’ve always believed it matters.