Why Birth Photography?

The Art and Importance of Birth Storytelling

Whenever I tell people that I am a birth photographer I often get asked to repeat myself, to make sure they heard me correctly. Why would someone want their birth photographed or turned into a film? Or why would anyone want to share those vulnerable moments with the world?

The way we give birth matters. The way we are born matters.

I believe that telling and sharing birth stories is critical to understanding our individual and collective origins. I believe that birth is the altar of our culture and that it is imperative to know what women and babies are experiencing in these foundational moments.

Birth used to be a collective experience, one that happened in the company of other women - with your mother, your sister, your family or neighbors.

Now for most women, the first birth they experience is their own.

“I wish that someone would have told me what was really going to happen.”

I have heard this sentiment again and again, women expressing that they were not culturally prepared for the reality of pregnancy, birth, or postpartum. It is true that we will never be fully prepared until we walk through these portals ourselves. But perhaps the lost art of intimate and communal storytelling has led to feeling isolated in and unprepared for the intensity of motherhood.

It is critically important that women hear each other’s birth stories.

I believe that birth photography and videography are changing the cultural paradigm around birth.

We currently find ourselves in a maternal healthcare crisis, where every day hundreds of thousands of women experience obstetric violence and birth trauma. Women are frequently being coerced and bullied into unnecessary inductions, c-sections, and other unwanted interventions that not only leave them feeling disempowered but lead to poorer maternal and infant health outcomes.

This is a system that is broken and needs to change.

It is incredibly important for women who have experienced birth trauma to tell their stories and to be heard by their community. This not only helps bring healing to their experiences but it is the first step in taking action to changing the culture that caused the harm. Their stories shines a light on the practices that need to be transformed. “Stories are data with a soul” - Brené Brown

We need to be exposed to a diversity of birth stories.

The over-medicalized, fearful, and traumatic birth stories are the ones dominantly shown to us through movies and TV.

In an increasingly technocratic society, footage of primal physiological birth awakens us to our shared memory of what is possible in birth.

Birth is an awakening, a remembering of who we really are to the very beginning.

Primal. Miracle.

Birth brings us back, to flesh and bone

Birth carries us, from life to death and back again

I yearn to hear the birth story of my long line of grandmothers. I want to know each detail… did they write them down or turn them into songs? Did they pass them down to their daughter’s listening ears around a fire?

Were they in pain? Did they scream? Who was there to witness them? I long to flip through a book of my ancestral birth stories. To sit at the feet of my 10,000 mothers, to listen to every detail with hungry ears.

Was the moon shining bright? Did the sun come up and stream light on your face? Could you feel your baby coming down? Did you talk to them and coax them out? Did you curse the pain or did you yield to it? What did you eat? Was it enough?

Did you name the ones who didn’t make it? Where were they laid to rest? What did you use to clean the blood? Who cut the cord and what was done with your placenta?

I will write mine down and ask that my daughters do the same.