Two Minutes After Birth, In A Hospital Room
I wasn't there for the labour itself. I arrived just after — timed for those first minutes, when a baby is only a few minutes old and everything in the room is still new.
A hospital room isn't somewhere you'd expect to feel much warmth. Fluorescent light, monitors, the particular quiet of a ward. And yet, in that room, none of that mattered. What I was photographing was the first feed. The first minutes of three people together as a family, instead of two. A father crying in a way I don't think he expected to, and I know I'll never forget. Doctors and midwives who were smiling too, quietly, at the edge of the frame, because even after however many births they've been part of, this one still moved them.
That's the thing about hospital birth photography that surprises people. It isn't about documenting a clinical event. It's about being present for something that happens to be happening in a clinical place — and finding that the feeling in the room has nothing clinical about it at all.
I've photographed this after a caesarean, too. The room, the procedure, the recovery — all of it very different from what people picture when they imagine a "birth photo." But the moment itself, the first time a baby is placed against their parent's skin, is exactly the same kind of unforgettable, whichever way that baby arrived.
I don't try to make a hospital room look like something it isn't. I don't bring props, or ask anyone to perform for the camera. I photograph what's actually there — the IV line still taped to an arm, the hospital blanket, the exhausted, radiant faces — because that's the true version of the story, and it's the version people want to remember, once enough time has passed that the exhaustion fades and only the joy is left.
If you're due to give birth in hospital, whether that's a planned caesarean, an induction, or simply where you feel safest, I'd love to be there for those first minutes too. You can find out more about how I approach birth photography here →
my approach to birth photography →