It was Anne Geddes’ pastime in the 1990s to picture nude newborns artistically curled up in pea pods or snuggled in hollowed-out watermelons. Geddes, a pre-Internet Cute Overload pioneer, sold an estimated 19 million books worldwide and certainly sowed the seed. In the nearly two decades since her coffee-table book Down in the Garden was published, a new age of newborn photo sessions has developed.
It’s no longer only for baby models and greeting cards for parents to plaster social media with their little Sophias and Aidans cocooned in muslin cocoons or tucked inside rustic wooden buckets. Photographers recommend that the photos take place between the ages of 5 and 10 days when the baby’s still-forming bones are most malleable for posing.
Babies pose in the clouds, slumber on handcrafted dreamcatchers, and peep out from little nests lined with knit blankets, thanks to the magic of digital editing. The Froggy, a photo made possible by “composite” merging numerous shots into one, in which a newborn rests on his tummy with his elbows raised and his head resting on his hands, maybe the most popular stance in the newborn realm.
“Almost everyone I know who has had a baby gets that shoot in before the birth announcement goes out,” says Rosie Pope, owner of the eponymous Upper East Side maternity boutique and concierge service. “I grew up with Anne Geddes calendars. Now you, too, can have your baby curled up in a shell!” Yet, she notes, “no one of my generations seems to have them of themselves.”
The baby photo shoot is a uniquely millennial phenomenon. It stands to reason that a generation that pictures everything—from their duckfaces in the mirror to the burger they ate for lunch—would pay for professional baby shots. “If you’re getting married and you want to capture that day, you hire a wedding photographer. In a similar way, if you have a baby and you want to capture the baby and really have these beautiful mementoes, then you need to hire someone who does that for a living,” says Lana Levy, a New York mother who had a newborn photo shoots done for both her 2-year-old and 4-month-old boys.
As with almost every current trend, social media has played a significant part in boosting the popularity of newborn photography. “People want to post adorable pictures of their babies rather than immediate, wrinkly ones with slight cone heads,” Pope observes. Few posts get as many likes as a 5-day-old peacefully dozing in a woven hammock or snoozing atop a small Princess and the Pea–style metal bed.
Renee Grant watched as her 6-day-old baby was nuzzled in a nest during a newborn session by Zoe Hiigli of New York. “I instantly posted on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook,” she explains.
“Social media is huge for me. I posted images from my maternity shoot to both Facebook and Instagram, and I’ll be doing the same once I receive my newborn shoot images,” Fallon Carmichael, a New York lifestyle blogger (Sage + Sparkle), who had a pumpkin-themed newborn shoot taken of her now 7-week-old son, Jayden, when he was 11 days old, said. Hiigli photographed Jayden in a pumpkin hat amidst leaves and gourds; another image shows him lounging among old baseballs and peanuts while wearing a knit Yankees outfit (a tribute to Carmichael’s husband’s favourite team).
The emergence of the newborn picture session coincided with the celebrity-driven glamorization of pregnancy and newborns, beginning with Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair, naked and belly-clutching, through Brad and Angelina relaxing with Shiloh in their bedroom on the cover of People. We marvel at celebrity “bumps” and remember the names of famous offspring. Non–Jolie-Pitt parents might feel like A-listers in their own communities with a baby shoot.
According to Rachel Blumenthal, CEO and creator of Cricket’s Circle, a shopping site for new and expecting moms, newborn photographs “started with celebrities, then went to the affluent who can afford the photographers, and now it’s going to the mainstream,” (Prices for newborn photos range from a few hundred dollars for smaller-market photographers and basic shots to $2,000 or more for extensive, multi-prop shootings with the albums and framed art prints that follow.)
Though there are no clear statistics on the number of newborn photography sessions shot in the United States now versus 20 or 30 years ago, baby-industry insiders believe the whimsical trend began to pick up approximately five to ten years ago. Prior to 2010, when Pope spoke at baby-industry fairs for anticipating parents, she saw just one or two newborn and pregnancy photographers (the two commonly go hand in hand) providing their services. “They’re now everywhere,” Pope observes.
For many parents, newborn images were restricted to those provided by hospitals, with newborns snuggled into standard-issue pink-and-blue-striped blankets laying in their plexiglass cribs. Newborn photography was often synonymous with an uncomfortable department shop image.
“Twenty years ago, when I started, there was nobody out there suggesting that you bring your baby in to be photographed in an artful way,” says Julie Floyd, founder of Classic Kids, a Chicago-based boutique photography studio for children, including newborns, with outposts in New York, Connecticut, and California. Back then, Floyd says, many seemed to believe (as some still do) that “newborns are just not photogenic people. That was back in the days of film photography, when there was a lot less that you could do to modify the features that were less attractive, like pimples and blotchiness of the skin. Babies are every color, from yellow to purple, because oftentimes they have a little jaundice or their circulation is not yet good.”
All of that has altered as digital technology has proliferated over the previous decade. “It’s much easier to take off the flakiness or smooth out the skin tone so that your baby has a pleasing skin tone versus having rainbow skin,” Floyd explains.
Still, newborn photography isn’t for everyone. They’ve been made fun of online for their lavish, twee props (one couple did a satirical “newborn-themed” session with their dog, and the photographs went viral). Those clichés have turned off stylish modern mothers like Blumenthal. “It felt a little forced and a little unnatural to me,” she said of her decision to forego newborn photography for her two children. “I think that there are some beautiful ones, and I do sort of regret not capturing that moment in time. But in some ways, I think the photos you capture at home are more representative of what’s actually happening in that moment in time.”
Indeed, newborn photos depict joy and sleeping newborns, rather than the agony of restless nights and spit-up. Ironically, it is precise because of this turmoil that many mothers spend in newborn photography, claiming that they want to record the priceless, precious moments they may never vividly recall themselves. “I will never see that baby again,” says Hiigli of her now-13-year-old son, a newborn photographer. “He’s gone forever, and all I have are my pictures.”