Anne Geddes Baby Pictures

People Weekly

Baby sitters
People Weekly. Chicago:. Sep. 10 1996: Anonymous:
Volume: 46
Issue: 14
Start Page: 118-120

BOTTICELLI WORKED in oils, Rodin in bronze, Winslow Homer in water colors. Anne Geddes may become famous for a fleshier medium'. "I'm a photographer who sees the art form in babies." says Geddes, a 40-year-old Australian. "Whenever I see an image of something in my mind, I see a baby in it.

For 15 years, Geddes has taken pictures of babies as angels, babies as lady bugs, babies as sleepy-looking little birds. Yet even though some 11 million Geddes products-calendars, posters, greeting cards-have been sold worldwide, her artistry remains forever in its infancy. This month she published her first coffee-table book, Down in the Garden, which features a fresh batch of babies decked Out as flora and fauna.

Why babies? "They're accessible and they are all beautiful." says the photographer, herself the mother of two young daughters (their father Geddes' husband Kel, 49, helps manage her business). Her secrets of success are meticulous preparation and endless patience. "With a 6-month old you have 20 minutes of attention, so when we bring a baby into the studio, everything is ready." says Geddes, who often gets her shot after the infant has dozed off. "Holding a baby and waiting for it to go to sleep might be pressure" she admits, "but it's a nice kind of pressure."

• Triplets Alesha. Kailee and Chantelle were "so tiny," says Geddes. "we just put them in the buckets and carried them around that way.
• For Water Lily: Tayla. Geddes tried out several babies in a heated pool. "They were all trying to eat the leaves," she says. "We even had a baby named Lily, but she didn't want to know about it".
• Brittany, surrounded by oversize prop eggs in Baby Chick used her own pacifier during the shoot. Geddes asks parents to be present and prefers 6-month olds because "they are easily entertained and think I'm really funny.
• You've heard of baby carrots?" asks Geddes. "Well, these are mine." Three newborns were "already asleep when we put them inside the carrots, which were just orange foam." The hats were topped with "fennel that was growing outside the studio."