Jenny Lewis didn’t read baby books before her children were born. “I wasn’t that anxious. I had this crazy notion that everything was going to be fine,” she says. She squeezed in one four-hour antenatal class before her daughter Ruby arrived in a birthing pool.
When she met other pregnant women after Herb, her second child, was born at home, she was struck by their anxiety: “I just saw all this fear and I had this overwhelming desire to say, ‘It’s going to be OK.’”
“I had a really good birth,” she says. “I was lucky. Of course, it was really hard but it was manageable. I’m not saying everything was a complete breeze – there was mastitis and expressing milk in train toilets on my way to jobs, it’s all a nightmare juggle. But all I ever heard about was epidurals and caesarians and pain and fear – there was no positive information.”
One book she did come across was a collection of case studies gathered by the American home-birth pioneer, Ina May Gaskin. She found them soothing and began to wonder if she could do a visual series about childbirth “showing that people are OK the day after”.
She made postcards and leaflets and, as she went around her east London neighbourhood with her son in the buggy, put them up in newsagents and community centres. When women responded, she noted their names and due dates and asked them to let her know when contractions began. “It was me, my bicycle and my camera,” she says.
“There was no stylist, no makeup artist, no brief from a magazine. I didn’t have loads of equipment, so I wasn’t hiding behind the technical aspect. Sometimes a grandma would open the door, but I was usually there before any other visitors so the women were totally in their bubble with the baby. What a privilege to be invited into that and to document it – the generosity of people blew me away.”
This month, a selection of Lewis’s portraits of new mothers are published in a book, One Day Young. Shot in natural light, often by a window with deep shadows and glimpses of furniture or washing-up liquid in the background, the pictures are muted and sombre. They are deeply tender images, but not all the women are beaming or filled with obvious joy. Lewis says that when she saw the first few, she knew she didn’t want to stop. In the end, she photographed 150 women over five years and then agonised over choosing 40 for the book.
“I tried doing different angles and really pulling back, but always the strength seemed to be in the direct eye contact. It’s the rawness I absolutely love and I didn’t want to distract too much with different compositions. It’s all about the mother and it doesn’t matter if it’s the back of the baby’s head.”
To start with, she photographed women up to several days after delivery but increasingly stuck to a rule that the pictures must be taken within 24 hours of birth and at home.
“When I look back it was all about capturing their identity. Every single picture was so quiet and peaceful and you don’t get that in hospital where everyone is diluted with everyone else’s stuff. When you get home, a bubble forms and I felt I was coming in from the outside world trying not to shatter this atmosphere.”
Lewis worked hard to find women of different ages and backgrounds, seeking help from midwives to find teenagers, one of whom she photographed in a children’s home. But her rule meant that many mothers (including those who, like me, spent days in hospital) were left out. I went to meet her wondering if I might find this annoying and the whole thing too jolly. What about the alarm many women feel when confronted with a new baby? What about stitches and depression?
I came away convinced she has done something generous and brave. Lewis tells the story of a doctor she met who was furious with a woman who was told a labour horror story as she prepared to give birth. Lewis thinks women sometimes revel in the gory details of their own experiences and should think before they speak.
“I don’t mean it’s all fluffy and everything will be over in an hour. But childbirth is OK for some people and it might be OK for you. And even if it’s really hard, you’re still going to be OK with the proper support. It’s not that the scared people shouldn’t have a voice, but they shouldn’t be the only voice. My project is one side of the story, but that story isn’t talked about very much.”
Lewis studied painting at college, realised the dark room was where she wanted to be, got her first job working long hours at a big London studio and began assisting other photographers before starting out on her own. Today, she is regularly employed by magazines but wanted an outlet for her own ideas about what is beautiful – “it’s not about their eyebrows being perfect or their stomach being flat”.
She studied art history at school and noticed how male-dominated the subject was. “Anything to do with women and motherhood is seen as a soft subject and not for the hierarchy of painting,” she says. “But look at these women! Look in their eyes and see what they’ve done. It’s fascinating but people gloss over it and it drives me crazy. The idea of a female photographer doing a project on motherhood does almost make you want to jump off a cliff but it was a compulsion and the more pictures I did, the more I believed it was necessary.”
Did witnessing so many of these precious moments make her wish for more babies or feel sad about the stage of life she had so recently left behind?
“I didn’t come away broody, I came away proud of the women,” she says. “They don’t know what’s around the corner, especially the first-time mums. The whirlwind hasn’t even hit them. I used to come away fascinated. What’s next for them? How are they going to cope?”
• One Day Young by Jenny Lewis is published by Hoxton Mini Press, £12.95, hoxtonminipress.com
