Photographing Births

I’ve been working on a photography project about birth and culture since 2006, but the first time I saw a birth, I didn’t have a camera – I didn’t have much, really, because I was three and the baby being born was my brother. I remember feeling excited, being tossed into a yellow beanbag by my grandpa afterward, and giving my brother his first hug and kiss.

The first birth I photographed was my sister’s. I was seven, and I took pictures of the wallpaper and the windows – I got distracted when she came out and I forgot to take pictures, but I loved seeing her come into the world. The real photographing didn’t start until much later.

When I was in high school, I volunteered on the maternity ward of a public hospital in the Dominican Republic. I took Spanish classes in the morning and snuck rum drinks at night, and in between the two I found myself inserting catheters and watching laboring women with instructions to call for a nurse if I saw a baby crowning. I saw a premature baby’s birth and death, held a 14 year-old’s hand as she labored, and struggled to contain my anger at the nurses’ lack of compassion. “Stop screaming,” they snapped at the mothers, “We all go through this.”

Years later, I became a photographer and thought of those experiences with disbelief. I was interested in the idea of birth as a universal experience, but one that varies so much depending on attendants, access and culture. So I decided to go back to the same hospital to photograph maternity care.

When I arrived, my friend and guide, Fulvia, pushed through the front gates, saying “we’re on official business.” I pled my case to a nurse but she brushed us off, and I briefly saw all of my plans crumbling around me. But when we realized that the problem was that I was wearing street clothes, we went to a used clothing market and found scrubs: a too-small shirt and enormous pants that stayed up with a lot of knots and positive thinking. With that, I began what would become a six-year project photographing birth attendants and culture.

I photographed a Navajo Nation-run hospital in Tuba City, a small, impoverished reservation town in Arizona with high rates of complicating factors like obesity, diabetes, and substance abuse. But the hospital had a staff of midwives who allowed women to labor at their own speed, and VBACs were encouraged – and the hospital’s C-section rate was half that of the national average.

I photographed the hospital in my hometown of Greenfield, Massachusetts, where midwives attend all deliveries with physician backup, allowing women with complications to receive midwifery care that would be inaccessible otherwise.

I traveled to Lagos, Nigeria to document a 63-year-old midwife’s work for Doctors Without Borders. She worked with a team of Nigerian midwives delivering babies in a slum so overcrowded that residents live in shacks built on garbage piles in a lagoon. Despite the challenges of malaria, language barriers, insufficient prenatal care and limited technology, the midwives improved healthcare in their own city.

And now I am seven months pregnant and eagerly, nervously, and curiously waiting for my own turn to deliver a baby.

Over the next month, I’ll be writing about and posting photographs from my recent trip to photograph Mexican midwifery students participating in an educational exchange with traditional Mayan midwives. I’m looking forward to it!