Photographer takes images of women before and after giving birth to show impact
Instead of focusing on the post-partum bodies of recent mothers, one photographer revealed what she saw in the faces of mums before and after children.
Vaida Markeviciute-Razmislavice's Becoming Mother project, in which she captured 33 women before and after childbirth, was one that took a look into the eyes of mums to see how motherhood impacted them.
While photographers have done a lot of before and after image collections, such as that of the man who took pictures of people as they started drinking alcohol, and another who snapped women pre and post orgasm, the Lithuanian (a mum herself) was more interested in their ‘gaze’.
Because in becoming a parent, the changes aren’t all in their physicality.
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A lot of the time, they can be mental, emotional and even spiritual too, which is why Markeviciute-Razmislavice's project was immediately something unique.
It homed in on the eyes as the pathway to the mums’ thoughts and feelings in her art.
'Her story, her unique journey, her transformation'
Speaking to My Modern Met, she explained how she wanted to ‘highlight women’s gaze’ by ‘taking away everything that would interfere with it’ – such as a baby bump.
While the side-by-side images of the women may seem subtle, if you look deeply, it’s as though each woman’s experience of becoming a mum is in her eyes.
“Behind every portrait,” Markeviciute-Razmislavice explains, “there is a woman’s story, her unique journey, her transformation.”
Women were photographed while pregnant with their first-born and then again within the first three months of giving birth. The shoots were ‘very private’, with very limited crew and no more than two models in the room at a time.
There was a slight hiccup though, in that the lighting for the second images had ‘different lighting’ due to the studio needing to be accessible for the women to bring their babies in prams.
The important question the photographer asked the new mums
During the shoots, Markeviciute-Razmislavice asked just one question: “What motherhood meant to them.”
She explained that during the first shoot, it was ‘all theory’ but in the second, ‘most of them couldn’t help smiling’.
“They openly shared about the new experience they were having, which they couldn’t l have imagined,” the photographer recalled. “Women talked about the new challenges and this inner power they discovered, that no matter how impossible it may look at first, you just do it, sometimes even not realising it was possible at first.”
'Something intangible, very subtle and at the same time, deep, and evident'
She explained how ‘so many different emotions’ were flowing and that she could see such a difference in the women.
“There was something intangible, very subtle and at the same time, deep, and evident. It is indeed rather hard for me to describe the changes the whole team witnessed,” she said.
“Some people see them, some don’t. It is vaguely possible to describe in detail the invisible behind the Becoming Mother portraits.”
What Markeviciute-Razmislavice noticed
The biggest changes the photographer said she saw between the women being pregnant and giving birth were: “Different gaze, completely different energy, maturity.”
She added that ‘all of these details’ of what the women had experienced are ‘hidden in the portraits’.
“And this also translates into a very important message: there are things one cannot see with the naked eye, the simplest form can hide the complex content,” the Becoming Mother creator said.
“Behind every portrait, there is a woman’s story, her unique journey, her transformation."
Jess Battison