"I absolutely adore children's books. Some of them are so enchanting and stand the test of time, and the art of illustrating and writing for children is truly remarkable. Our daughters were at that age when we used to read them children's books all the time.
After ten years of photographing newborns and two-year-olds for families, I gradually delved into doing some personal work. It's tough but joyful work, and certainly not easy. I used to do two portrait sessions a day, five days a week, and after eight or nine years, I felt the need for some creative time for myself, away from client photoshoots and forced smiles.
To maintain my sanity, I decided to dedicate one day a month to create something just for myself. One of the very first images I created was of babies in cabbages. There's a black and white image of a baby named Joshua hanging from a hook, wrapped in some fabric. It's a stunning black-and-white image. I remember looking at it in the darkroom and thinking, 'I really love this. And I don't have to worry about anyone else's opinion.' And that's how it all began, and it was in the realm of storybook genre.
"Down in the Garden" was a tremendous success, but prior to that, there were greeting cards and calendars. I started by doing 10 or 12 images, and people suggested, 'You should create a calendar.' The elaborate setups for many of those images came from my creativity in producing greeting cards, where you have to do themes like Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mother's and Father's Day.
Then, it led to "Down in the Garden," and as any author would tell you, when you create your work, write your book or musical score, or, in my case, photograph this book, you have no concept of how people will react to it. I always had some reservations about that."
Geddes (born in 1956), who sees herself as a storyteller, turned "Down in the Garden" into a children's story because that's where she was going with all these little characters. Her tiny baby models were photographed as fairies, gnomes, sunflowers, water lilies, field mice, ladybugs, and peas in a pod in this magical and fun-filled book.
One of the reasons for its success is the images. She once witnessed a little baby sitting on the studio floor, kissing photos of the babies in the book, but there's also a sense of adult humor running through it. The book's appeal was widespread, and people responded to it in various ways.
Next, Oprah Winfrey invited her to her show, which was when she had a book club. Geddes had never watched Oprah's show before, as she lived in New Zealand at the time, and it was a daytime show.
During the show, Oprah brought out two newborn babies in bumblebee outfits and conducted the interview. At the end of the interview, she picked up "Down in the Garden" and exclaimed, "This is the best coffee table book I've seen this year." The book shot up to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, taking Geddes by surprise.
"I think I got pigeonholed a bit in that genre, and for years, I couldn't look at the book again because I knew that I was more than that, but I hadn't produced anything to prove it," Geddes recalls. "My husband, Kel, who is a marketing guru and TV executive, said, 'You've got to lead your audience.'
"I told him I want to do the next book, something so simple and pure. I wanted to do 'Pure.' But he was right in saying, 'It's too much of a change. You've got to meet them halfway.' So, my second book contained some of my most simple and classic imagery and images from the Garden book. It had some nudity, so we launched it in Europe, where they don't bat an eyelid for much of that."
"Even here in New York, where I shoot, you go into a blank space on the day of a shoot or a setup date and create everything out of nothing," Geddes says. "You just bring it all together and create that world, and then it gets dismantled, and you go away. That space is a sense of possibility in my mind, possibly because I'm a Virgo, and we like control.
"For the first ten years of my career, which took me from Sydney to Melbourne to Auckland in New Zealand, I exclusively did private portraiture of families, especially children. I love little kids because they always have this sense of promise. They're like an open book, and the more I photographed younger and younger children, the more I marveled at how beautiful they were and how exquisite a newborn baby is because of everything they represent. They are us at the very beginning of our lives. Nothing good or bad has happened to them; they're just pure.
"There's no malice, no guile; they are innocent little babies, and it's only what we instill in them as they grow older that makes them different individuals. My work is about the promise and the miracle of new life."
Babies Are Not Suitable Subjects? Geddes won a competition with Agfa to go to Photokina in Germany and went with Kel. Afterward, they went to London with 30 prints as examples of her work to meet various publishers before "Down in the Garden."
"We went to one place to see if people understood what we were doing or not," says Geddes. "I faced a significant hurdle because of the subject matter. When I first proposed doing a calendar, one of the publishers said there were so many baby calendars. I went to look and couldn't find any. The concept of babies being cute and funny is everywhere, but they aren't.
"We went to another publisher who said to me, 'If I can give you some advice, just photographing babies is never going to work for you.' Then the next meeting was with Athena (British fine art printer), who got the whole thing.
I remember sitting in their boardroom outside London, and they spread all my photos on their table and said, 'This is fantastic; we want the worldwide rights to all of this.' (They didn't get all the work, as it was spread out among different publishers.)
"Another publisher said, 'You need to broaden your portfolio. Babies are just never going to work. You need to have some adults, animals, and... Even the art and gallery market don't think it's cool to have imagery of babies. They don't think babies are a viable project.
"I won a competition for the annual New Zealand Institute of Professional Photographers print competition in the portrait section. I nearly got Champion print, but I didn't. At the time, the head of Kodak in New Zealand came up to me and said, 'Thank God you didn't win. How could we have a baby on the boardroom wall at Kodak?'
"Other photographers, mostly men, would ask me what kind of work I did. And I'm like, 'I photograph babies.' I wish there was another way to say it that sounds different, but that's what I do, right? And they would invariably say,
'I used to do that when I was first starting out,' implying that they moved on to something more important
