What I Know About Home Birth — From Both Sides of the Camera

I was twenty-two. It was the late nineties, and where I lived, there were no antenatal classes, no birth preparation courses, none of the structure that exists now to walk a first-time mother through what's coming. There was just a decision I made early on: I would not give birth in a hospital.

So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I bought a book on birth and read it properly — not skimming, but studying it the way you study something that frightens you a little. By the time the day came, I felt like I already knew what was happening to me, even though it was my first time and I was so young.

The birth itself was easy. My husband was beside me the whole time, and I remember the strangest, funniest detail more clearly than almost anything else: we had spent the entire pregnancy certain we were having a boy. We even had the name picked out. So when she finally arrived and he lifted her up, there was this beat of pure confusion before we both realised — it's a girl. We laughed. After everything, that was the moment that broke the tension completely.

I think that experience shaped how I photograph birth more than anything I've learned since.

Photographing someone else's home birth

Years later, I found myself in a client's home for a birth that was nothing like a quick story. It was long. Hours and hours of it. And unlike a hospital, where you might have some control over light, here I worked with whatever was actually in the room — no setup, no adjustments, because the only thing that mattered was that the mother felt comfortable, not watched.

I made myself as invisible as I could. I didn't direct, didn't ask anyone to move or pause. I just stayed close and quiet and ready.

What I didn't expect was how much I would feel. I had been through this myself, so every stage of it landed somewhere in me — I wasn't just observing, I was recognising. That made it harder in a way I hadn't anticipated, but it also meant I understood exactly what mattered enough to capture and what didn't. Because the day was long, I had time to see so much: the early hours, the shift into harder labour, and finally the moment everyone in the room had been waiting for.

Why I still believe in this work

A home birth has no schedule I can plan around and no lighting I can control. It asks a photographer to disappear into the background and to trust that the story will tell itself, in its own time, exactly as it happened.

That's the only kind of birth photography I know how to do, really — because it's the only kind I've ever lived through myself.

If you're planning a home birth in London and want it photographed honestly, without posing or performance, I'd love to talk about it.