April is C-Section Awareness Month.
If you follow me, you're going to be seeing A LOT of blue everywhere from the operating room.
The following birth photograph was one of the first c-sections I ever attended (apart from the birth of both of my children who were born via cesarean)
I saw a post by @csectionstrong (C-Section Strong) yesterday that said:
C-Section
Cesarean
Cesarean Section
C-Section Birth
Belly Birth
Cesarean Birth
They all mean the same thing. Use the one that most resonates with you.
The day I documented this birth story for my clients C & E, they became parents for the first time ever
That give me *Chills*
What a humbling honor to witness two human beings transform into parenthood for the first time ever.
At this point, when I captured baby Easton’s birth in the operating room for parents C & E, (pictured above), I was already a mother to two children (back then during this birth, my kids were ages 1 + 4 years old).
Let’s take a side bar and talk about how hard it is to not always be there for your kids as a mom:
At some point while I was with this family during their labor, my family was actually celebrating my youngest daughter’s first birthday. (While I absolutely love the work that I do, because I have a strong passion for supporting families in a unique way through powerful birth photography, not everyone has this passion for birth photography. When you are a full time birth worker, and all you do is birth all month, every month, you start to miss important moments of your life. The hardest moments to miss, arguably, as a mother, are the ones that mean a lot to your kids. Such as when I missed my daughter’s 1st birthday, during this birth, it can break you if this field of work is not something you do for more than just the financial stability. You have to have an element of being a woman’s advocate to not be completely shattered when you are not present for your family for milestones that are extraordinarily meaningful to you as a mom but also important to them as children).
I ended up being with this family for about 24 hours.
I had only been in the operating room twice prior to this birth as a photographer, and twice as a mother, (for a total of me having been in the operating room 4 times prior to attending this birth).
The reason this exact moment and image have stayed with me for all of time is because of how deeply UNSCRIPTED it was:
Her wife gently took her hand and brought it to her son's face, to feel the softness of his face and to touch her son for the first time in her life, in this exact moment.
It is exactly moments like this when I realize that I did not choose a career like everyone else, my career chose me. Birth Photography chose me because it knew that I would be strong enough to sacrifice moments of my own life as a mother to give to families who deserve to never forget this moment.
Parents C & E will never forget the first moment they met baby Easton. They won’t ever forget how they saw, smelled, heard and kissed him for the first time, thanks to the images I captured behind the scenes.
I will never forget this powerful birth and how it changed my life, and I am humbly grateful that this family so graciously welcomed me into their birth space and honored me with trusting me to capture their story and share it with the world.
“Birth Photography is not a necessity, it is a luxury”
I want to speak to the above statement. I want to address how globally, many people argue that birth photography is a luxury, and a want, not a need.
And right now especially during COVID-19, it is being globally argued that (not only doulas) birth photographers are not essential care team members.
I disagree with this 100%, not because it is my career, but I disagree with this statement because I have witnessed the feedback from my birth photography clients from the last 6 years.
If you purchase a luxury item, your feedback is usually on the high quality, the expert craftsmanship and the beauty, right?
So if that is true, that birth photography is a luxury item alone, and not an essential part of your birth team, a majority of my clients should be responding to their birth stories by saying “the photos are so beautiful and high quality!”
Yet my clients give me different feedback.
Are their images beautiful and high quality? Yes. Yet my clients do not focus on the beauty and high quality of their images.
When my clients give me feedback on their images, the first thing they tell me, with tears in their eyes, with a tremble in their voice, is how these images impacted them emotionally. They tell me what these images mean to them. They tell me how they are suddenly aware that when they were deciding if to hire a birth photographer, what a thin line it is between losing these memories forever vs. ensuring you never lose them: with one decision they could have ensured they lost these memories forever, by simply saying that they decided not to hire me. And that thin line shakes them and makes them realize how momentous this experience of meeting their baby was to them.
So I argue that birth photography is not a luxury, and it is a major necessity.
While paying for the investment of birth photography is hard work, yes. A majority of my clients are not millionaires. And with the high investment that on-call artwork is, it is hard work to pay for it, yes.
The bottom line:
Only those families who themselves feel deeply the value in the mental health need for their family of never losing their memories, only those families will be the only ones on earth who will ever invest in birth photography.
Families who wish to experience their births first hand without photographic memories, and are ok with losing many of those memories (90% of my clients say they don’t remember more than half of the moments in the images), those families will not invest in on-call birth photography.
But there is no right or wrong answer here.
More than likely, if you found yourself reading this blog post, and got this far, your heart yearns for all these moments and more to be captured for the rest of time from your birthing day, and nothing short of this can replace what your heart yearns for.
From the Digital Photography School, and adaptation of 6 reasons why Birth Photography is important:
A Birth Story via photographs tell us what is important to us. When you ask people what possessions they would rescue from their burning house, one of the most frequent answers is the photograph album or a computer with their digital images. When in panic mode it’s interesting that we would probably grab photos rather than valuable jewelry. This impulse to save our recorded memories is a powerful force which tells us much about the role of photography in our lives and our constant desire to distil our most precious moments into images.”
Photographs are part of our legacy
“Photographs matter because they freeze moments of our lives which pass unremarkably and which seem to have little importance to us at the time.”
Photographs allow us to share and to communicate.
“Images are much more than a simple record.”
Photography makes us artists
Photography is a complex language Our images can express joy and sorrow, wonder and sympathy. Every human emotion can find a place in photography. Photography develops a visual language for some of the most difficult emotions.
Photography has the power to move us
