Emulsion On Paper
an article for BirthLink Community News, vol. 2, March 2000

....Growing up, my understanding of birth was ugly. A laboring woman was a silly caricature swearing at her husband and puffing ridiculously while other people in the room, safely sterilized in hospital greens, sensibly ignored her so they could attend to the real action of producing a squirming child from underneath the magic white sheet. The doctor was the hero and the mother a foolish, noisy impediment. This image was helpfully repeated in every sitcom, movie and book available to me until there was no question that this would be a very embarrassing, grotesque phase of my life that I'd do well to skip via anesthesia or adoption.

....Then in college I met a woman who had two moons tattooed on her ankle, one full and one quarter, and wore garnet jewelry a few days out of every month to honor the arrival of her menses. She said that she'd been camping once when she squatted to urinate and saw beneath her the most beautiful shining rubies that were almost glowing with a deep rich redness against the leaves. She realized it was menstrual blood and said that it was that experience that first showed her what a great gift, how beautiful and elegant the fertility cycle was and how grateful she was for her part in it.

....I went home and looked at my boxes of tampons and pads, all emphasizing the word 'protection' and 'safety'--clearly there was something wretched these powerful products could counteract--they were bulletproof. Valiantly protecting my honor, rescuing me from the social death of my own femaleness.

....My friend told me about some of the over 1000 births she'd attended as a Midwife in El Paso, Texas. She made pregnancy, labor and birth sound like the most powerful, visually moving and spiritually fulfilling experience imaginable. But that was a problem for me as a visual thinker, I could only imagine what she talked about. She had some fuzzy black and white pictures from pregnancy books printed in the 70's but these couldn't begin to approach the grandeur of the world she described.

....Being a photography student, I investigated the precedent for birth images in the fine art realm. It didn't take too long to find out that there really isn't one. Most of what I could find had more in common with the sitcom birth aesthetic than any other. There were a few black and whites of women screaming (shown from the neck up) and babies held in hands, one connected to an umbilical cord that disappeared under the white sheet that helpfully protected me from having any idea of what had just gone on.

....It was years after finishing both my photography degree and a Doula training course that I was first invited to photograph a birth. It was a home birth with a Midwife and two Doulas and it easily lived up to every feeling and image I'd heard described years before. To witness birth has been one of the greatest gifts of my life and I'm humbled and awed by its earthly expression.

....My experience with showing birth images to people has been fascinating. One of the most memorable was 70-year-old man who looked over my contact sheets, put on his glasses and looked again as tears floated over his cheeks. I asked him if he was alright and he said, "They wouldn't let me in. My Emmy, she was screaming, my Emmy and they wouldn't let me help her, they said I'd make it worse. My daughters, I wasn't there, they wouldn't let me in." He asked if he could borrow them for a while and shuffled out of the room, still staring down at the papers and wiping his eyes. Later Emmy, also 70, came to talk to me about her births and thank me for both taking and sharing the pictures.

....My grandmother, though, thinks they're just awful and once at work three middle-aged women came over to my cube to tell me they were disgusted by the thought of a photographed birth. Thankfully these have been exceptions to a widely held interest in seeing renditions from the outside of what we've all experienced at least once as an insider.

....I wish that as a toddler or a young girl I'd had access to this visual an understanding of my body and the origin of human life. I wish all the people I talk to who are terrified by home birth had gorgeous images in mind of comfortable, secure circumstances filled with strong, loving and well-supported births. I wish the people who will have to unlearn their birth references after me will be younger than I was and have to work less diligently to make the bridge into more a clearer, more honest understanding of this process. It seems very difficult to me for a person to respect the uncontainable, natural processes of birth and then disrespect the innate purpose or expression of other people, creatures or places.

....And someday I hope to publish a book of magnificent, rich color images of births that helped the participants feel the strength of having been given the great gift of briefly witnessing the inconceivable mystery of being. Of the veil lifting for a moment to say this is life, this is vulnerability, this is the energy you can either join with or lose by denying it. This is who you are and it's remarkable.

Hannah Maximova, birth photographer