On my 27th birthday in April 1983, our first child Rachel was born at the cottage we rented a few kilometres out of Manjimup in Western Australia’s south-west corner. We had made the move out of the city, but we were still a step away from the south coast.
A newborn child, becoming a father, Marg becoming a mother – all of this cried out to be put before a camera. But I was fully engaged with the birth and the aftermath. I found time to take this pic about mid-morning as Marg and Rachel relaxed from the strenuous effort of giving birth and being born.
We were complete newbies as parents, of course. We had bought and washed a bundle of nappies, but there wasn’t a single safety pin in the house to hold one together. Our little cottage didn’t have a phone and we couldn’t call our family and friends. I had to make a trip into town later that day to buy nappy pins and make phone calls to let people know our good news.
Babies and children are fascinating photo subjects. From day one, a baby’s entire energy is directed at growing and changing. You can see daily, weekly and monthly developments unfolding before your eyes. It is a parent’s pleasure to fall under the entrancement of this little being. Among a great many other things, for me that meant taking a lot of photos.
When I look back now, I couldn’t say that I took too many, even though many have little photographic value. I had to take the many to capture the few that really shine through. However, the total number would fall far short of the number of photos taken of most western children these days, now that we don’t have to pay for film. By way of comparison, I recently visited my new granddaughter in Latvia, and stayed for five weeks. In that brief visit, I took more photos of her than I took of my daughter over the whole year in 1983.
All the same, I took some photos that I really like. In this one, Rachel is a few months old and was propped in a bean bag. She could hold her head steady but could not yet crawl. The accidental arrangement of the objects in the photo and the extremely wide aperture (f1.2 presumably) mean that her face, arm and hand are in focus and almost everything else is blurred. There are nice catchlights in her eyes and she has a happy, attentive expression. Things just fell together for this one.
Look out for a whole lot of family photos for the next couple of decades.