Caine
2004-06-19 08:37:07 UTC
The top photo is highly repugnant. The site requires registration, you can
use nopass/nopass http://tinyurl.com/2aswv
They're proud, with child, and want to capture their form forever.
Sonia DE LA ROSA, a 29-year-old registered nurse from San Diego, is
reclining in a lounge chair in a garage-cum-studio in Encino getting ready
for her photo shoot. She has already changed out of her black pants and
crisp blue-and-white striped blouse and is now wearing a cozy blue robe and
bright pink fuzzy slippers. Shally Zucker, the makeup artist, finishes
blending in the last bit of cover-up and then gently opens De La Rosa's
robe, revealing her large, bulging belly.
"Wow, you hardly have any stretch marks at all," Zucker says as she smooths
foundation over De La Rosa's stomach, blending away the linea nigra, the
brown vertical line that runs from the navel to the pubic bone.
As Zucker applies the finishing touches, the photographer, Rachel Jeraffi,
emerges from the studio.
"Are you ready to start?" she asks.
A little nervously, De La Rosa nods. Jeraffi and Zucker pull her out of the
chair it appears to have swallowed her and she follows the photographer
into the large, darkened room.
Building a career
For the past 10 years, Jeraffi has made a career of taking pictures of
pregnant women like De La Rosa. She shoots an average of four pregnant
women a week, some who have found her on the Internet and flown in from
Canada or Arizona. A three-hour session with Jeraffi costs $575 ($675 on
weekends) and includes three rolls of black-and-white medium-format film,
face and belly makeup, light hairstyling and proof prints. The photos
themselves can cost as little as $55 for one 5-by-7 print and as much as
$2,715 for a personalized leather scrapbook of 25 8-by-10 images.
To highlight her clients' distinctive bodies, Jeraffi asks them to remove
their clothes and then wraps them in various fabrics, making sure to
respect each woman's privacy boundaries. But by the end of the sessions
most of her clients (very few of whom have ever dropped their clothes in
front of a camera before) are completely nude, with an arm covering their
breasts and just a slip of fabric over their genitalia.
"When I was growing up in Israel, women wore really big stuff when they
were pregnant and covered it up as much as possible," Jeraffi says. "It was
definitely not something anybody would want to capture on film."
To this day, she says, her mother has mixed feelings about her work. "My
mother is like, 'Rachel, your work is beautiful, but who the hell pays you
to do that?' I'm like, 'You'd be surprised, Mom.' "
In 1991, Tina Brown and Annie Leibovitz created an uproar by putting a
naked, eight-months-pregnant Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair. But
they also helped designate pregnancy as glamorous. There was decidedly less
media frenzy when Cindy Crawford posed pregnant and nude for the cover of W
magazine in 1999, and since then pregnancy photography has become
increasingly popular not just for movie stars and models, but for regular
women as well.
"When I started off it was, I don't want to say hippie-dippy granola
people, but it was the kind of people you would expect to take their
clothes off," says Jennifer Loomis, who has been specializing in pregnancy
photography for over 12 years and who flies around the country to meet with
clients. "Now I have sorority girls, black women, who tend to be more
demure. I do a lot of lesbian couples. I have a ton of Asian clients
Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans and their culture tends to be more modest.
Those women often won't tell their parents beforehand."
"My clients are teachers, doctors, nurses, you name it," says Heather Hart,
a photographer in Santa Monica who says 70% of her business is pregnant
women. "Now I even have husbands calling me to set up a shoot for their
wives."
Sandra Matthews, an associate professor of film and photography at
Hampshire College and the coauthor of "Pregnant Pictures," which traces the
history of photographs of pregnant women in America, says pregnancy
portraiture is a recent phenomenon. When her book was published in 2000,
she and her coauthor were unaware that women were paying to have themselves
photographed. "Even in the late '90s we spoke to photographers who were
trying to publish art books of photos of pregnant women but who couldn't
find publishers," she says. "There was a kind of squeamishness about the
topic, and the publishers didn't think they could sell it."
The shoot
"We're going to start covered and then see what happens," Jeraffi tells De
La Rosa.
She pops a CD into a small boombox (Lifescapes' Celtic harp compilation)
and selects two pieces of white silk from a rack of fabrics she keeps on
the far wall of her studio.
De La Rosa stands a little uncomfortably on a black backdrop. Jeraffi
returns with the silks and asks De La Rosa to remove her robe.
She glances at Jeraffi and pauses for a moment.
"Just drop it," Jeraffi says. "There is no modesty in this studio."
With a blush, and a nervous laugh, De La Rosa lets the robe fall to the
floor.
Jeraffi ties one piece of silk below De La Rosa's protruding tummy so that
it looks like a long skirt, and she ties the other under her arms so her
chest and stomach are covered. Then she steps back and turns on an
industrial fan positioned six feet away. The silk billows in the breeze,
revealing De La Rosa's stomach, and her dark shoulder length hair streams
behind her.
"Beautiful! Just let the air out! Good! Very nice!" Jeraffi yells over the
fan and the harp music, standing behind her camera now. She has De La Rosa
clasp her hands under her chin and throw her head back at an angle.
"Great!" Jeraffi yells. "Just close your eyes and let your belly out!"
An idealized view
This is De La Rosa's first pregnancy. "I always wanted to have a baby by
30, and my due date is just under two weeks before my 30th birthday," she
says. There was no question of the father coming to the shoot (although
some men do). He currently lives in Chicago, where De La Rosa thinks she
will move in a few months.
She first heard about Jeraffi's work three years ago when her sister
Maribel was pregnant with her first child. Maribel had seen Jeraffi on an
episode of "A Baby Story" on the Learning Channel and was so desperate to
have Jeraffi photograph her pregnancy that she tracked down the producer of
the show to get her contact information. Jeraffi says many of her clients
have heard about her from the TLC program, which was replayed almost once a
month for three years. She also advertises in pregnancy magazines, has a
website and leaves fliers in maternity stores and yoga studios.
All of Jeraffi's photos have the same aesthetic. The focus and lighting are
soft, and the subjects are swathed in diaphanous fabrics usually silks
and tulles if they are wearing anything at all. She always asks her
subjects to close their eyes, as if in peaceful meditation on the growing
life within them. The resulting photographs look like ethereal glamour
shots, in which the subjects appear as beautiful and as tranquil as
possible an idealized version of the pregnant condition.
What the pictures don't show is any of the pain associated with pregnancy.
Jeraffi tells her clients to schedule appointments between their 30th and
32nd week when their bellies are big but the rest of their bodies haven't
started to swell. With the help of the makeup artists she hires, she hides
stretch marks and any signs of exhaustion. Jeraffi was even able to
photograph a client who came to her with an IV in her arm, and conceal it.
"We took the bag off the pole and strapped it to my thigh," says Melissa
Martineau, who had been in the hospital for severe side pain at the time of
her appointment with Jeraffi. "I did poses standing, kneeling, laying down,
sometimes totally naked. Most of them were shot from the side so you
couldn't see it, or if they were facing head on we draped a little fabric
over my arm.
"My husband is really conservative, and I didn't know if he would like the
pictures," she continues. "But we just got them back, and when he saw them
he was in awe. He wants us to buy them all."
Jeraffi says her sessions are "self-esteem boosters." "Because when you are
pregnant you don't usually feel like you are beautiful a lot of the time,"
she says. "You feel sick and you are heavy, but looking at yourself without
all the stretch marks and without all the uncomfortableness it is like
seeing yourself from the outside."
Booming business
When Linnea Lenkus set up her photography studio in South Pasadena in 1998,
she specialized in portraits of kids and babies. But ever since the Cindy
Crawford cover of W in 1999 the number of pregnant women who call her has
grown exponentially. Now about half the work she does is pregnancy
portraiture. "I think the W magazine cover just started people thinking
about it and feeling they wanted to do that for themselves," she says.
According to Matthews, the iconic magazine covers, and the increasing
popularity of maternity clothes designed to accentuate rather than conceal
large bellies, helped change the public perception of pregnancy. "I think
it was a reflection of people being more accepting of the pregnant body as
sexual and attractive," she says.
Many women say they feel especially sexy during their pregnancy.
"Oh my God, I loved being pregnant," says Diana Roth, one of Jeraffi's
clients. "I loved every minute of it. I loved the way I felt, loved the way
I looked. All my clothes were short and tight. I loved showing my belly."
"There were many times when I felt the sexiest I ever felt during my
pregnancy," says Crystal Edwards, another of Jeraffi's clients. "I went to
my high school reunion at eight months pregnant and it was a relief. I
looked great without having to lose 10 pounds."
And men have responded as well.
"My husband happens to be the man who is really attracted to me when I'm
pregnant," says Jessica Echeverry, one of Hart's clients. "When I'm
pregnant he finds me really attractive and pretty. He said, 'I want it
captured in pictures, so go find someone.' "
Lenkus also thinks that since more older women are having children, and
because of fertility pills and treatments, there are more "miracle babies."
"Pregnancy has become a really big thing, especially for women who never
thought it would happen to them," says Lenkus, who was once told she would
never have a baby, but now has a son and recently gave birth to twins.
"When I was pregnant last time I was so happy. I photographed myself every
month. I just loved to watch it."
'Let the air out'
De LA ROSA'S photo session is winding down. Jeraffi changes the CD in the
boombox to one called "The Science of Sleep" and takes a series of shots of
De La Rosa totally naked, lying on a mattress covered in soft camel-colored
velvet.
"We're almost done, you just have three left, OK?" she says, stepping down
from her ladder.
De La Rosa nods, but she looks tired. She left her house at 8 in the
morning to make it to the 11 o'clock appointment, and she still has the
three-hour return drive to look forward to.
"Do you want the Eve look?" Jeraffi asks.
De La Rosa nods again, and Jeraffi takes a plastic vine from the rack of
fabrics. She snakes the fake plant around De La Rosa's body and, after
spreading out the tired pregnant woman's hair on the mattress, climbs back
up the ladder.
"Great, Sonia," she says. "Let the air out. Beautiful."
use nopass/nopass http://tinyurl.com/2aswv
They're proud, with child, and want to capture their form forever.
Sonia DE LA ROSA, a 29-year-old registered nurse from San Diego, is
reclining in a lounge chair in a garage-cum-studio in Encino getting ready
for her photo shoot. She has already changed out of her black pants and
crisp blue-and-white striped blouse and is now wearing a cozy blue robe and
bright pink fuzzy slippers. Shally Zucker, the makeup artist, finishes
blending in the last bit of cover-up and then gently opens De La Rosa's
robe, revealing her large, bulging belly.
"Wow, you hardly have any stretch marks at all," Zucker says as she smooths
foundation over De La Rosa's stomach, blending away the linea nigra, the
brown vertical line that runs from the navel to the pubic bone.
As Zucker applies the finishing touches, the photographer, Rachel Jeraffi,
emerges from the studio.
"Are you ready to start?" she asks.
A little nervously, De La Rosa nods. Jeraffi and Zucker pull her out of the
chair it appears to have swallowed her and she follows the photographer
into the large, darkened room.
Building a career
For the past 10 years, Jeraffi has made a career of taking pictures of
pregnant women like De La Rosa. She shoots an average of four pregnant
women a week, some who have found her on the Internet and flown in from
Canada or Arizona. A three-hour session with Jeraffi costs $575 ($675 on
weekends) and includes three rolls of black-and-white medium-format film,
face and belly makeup, light hairstyling and proof prints. The photos
themselves can cost as little as $55 for one 5-by-7 print and as much as
$2,715 for a personalized leather scrapbook of 25 8-by-10 images.
To highlight her clients' distinctive bodies, Jeraffi asks them to remove
their clothes and then wraps them in various fabrics, making sure to
respect each woman's privacy boundaries. But by the end of the sessions
most of her clients (very few of whom have ever dropped their clothes in
front of a camera before) are completely nude, with an arm covering their
breasts and just a slip of fabric over their genitalia.
"When I was growing up in Israel, women wore really big stuff when they
were pregnant and covered it up as much as possible," Jeraffi says. "It was
definitely not something anybody would want to capture on film."
To this day, she says, her mother has mixed feelings about her work. "My
mother is like, 'Rachel, your work is beautiful, but who the hell pays you
to do that?' I'm like, 'You'd be surprised, Mom.' "
In 1991, Tina Brown and Annie Leibovitz created an uproar by putting a
naked, eight-months-pregnant Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair. But
they also helped designate pregnancy as glamorous. There was decidedly less
media frenzy when Cindy Crawford posed pregnant and nude for the cover of W
magazine in 1999, and since then pregnancy photography has become
increasingly popular not just for movie stars and models, but for regular
women as well.
"When I started off it was, I don't want to say hippie-dippy granola
people, but it was the kind of people you would expect to take their
clothes off," says Jennifer Loomis, who has been specializing in pregnancy
photography for over 12 years and who flies around the country to meet with
clients. "Now I have sorority girls, black women, who tend to be more
demure. I do a lot of lesbian couples. I have a ton of Asian clients
Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans and their culture tends to be more modest.
Those women often won't tell their parents beforehand."
"My clients are teachers, doctors, nurses, you name it," says Heather Hart,
a photographer in Santa Monica who says 70% of her business is pregnant
women. "Now I even have husbands calling me to set up a shoot for their
wives."
Sandra Matthews, an associate professor of film and photography at
Hampshire College and the coauthor of "Pregnant Pictures," which traces the
history of photographs of pregnant women in America, says pregnancy
portraiture is a recent phenomenon. When her book was published in 2000,
she and her coauthor were unaware that women were paying to have themselves
photographed. "Even in the late '90s we spoke to photographers who were
trying to publish art books of photos of pregnant women but who couldn't
find publishers," she says. "There was a kind of squeamishness about the
topic, and the publishers didn't think they could sell it."
The shoot
"We're going to start covered and then see what happens," Jeraffi tells De
La Rosa.
She pops a CD into a small boombox (Lifescapes' Celtic harp compilation)
and selects two pieces of white silk from a rack of fabrics she keeps on
the far wall of her studio.
De La Rosa stands a little uncomfortably on a black backdrop. Jeraffi
returns with the silks and asks De La Rosa to remove her robe.
She glances at Jeraffi and pauses for a moment.
"Just drop it," Jeraffi says. "There is no modesty in this studio."
With a blush, and a nervous laugh, De La Rosa lets the robe fall to the
floor.
Jeraffi ties one piece of silk below De La Rosa's protruding tummy so that
it looks like a long skirt, and she ties the other under her arms so her
chest and stomach are covered. Then she steps back and turns on an
industrial fan positioned six feet away. The silk billows in the breeze,
revealing De La Rosa's stomach, and her dark shoulder length hair streams
behind her.
"Beautiful! Just let the air out! Good! Very nice!" Jeraffi yells over the
fan and the harp music, standing behind her camera now. She has De La Rosa
clasp her hands under her chin and throw her head back at an angle.
"Great!" Jeraffi yells. "Just close your eyes and let your belly out!"
An idealized view
This is De La Rosa's first pregnancy. "I always wanted to have a baby by
30, and my due date is just under two weeks before my 30th birthday," she
says. There was no question of the father coming to the shoot (although
some men do). He currently lives in Chicago, where De La Rosa thinks she
will move in a few months.
She first heard about Jeraffi's work three years ago when her sister
Maribel was pregnant with her first child. Maribel had seen Jeraffi on an
episode of "A Baby Story" on the Learning Channel and was so desperate to
have Jeraffi photograph her pregnancy that she tracked down the producer of
the show to get her contact information. Jeraffi says many of her clients
have heard about her from the TLC program, which was replayed almost once a
month for three years. She also advertises in pregnancy magazines, has a
website and leaves fliers in maternity stores and yoga studios.
All of Jeraffi's photos have the same aesthetic. The focus and lighting are
soft, and the subjects are swathed in diaphanous fabrics usually silks
and tulles if they are wearing anything at all. She always asks her
subjects to close their eyes, as if in peaceful meditation on the growing
life within them. The resulting photographs look like ethereal glamour
shots, in which the subjects appear as beautiful and as tranquil as
possible an idealized version of the pregnant condition.
What the pictures don't show is any of the pain associated with pregnancy.
Jeraffi tells her clients to schedule appointments between their 30th and
32nd week when their bellies are big but the rest of their bodies haven't
started to swell. With the help of the makeup artists she hires, she hides
stretch marks and any signs of exhaustion. Jeraffi was even able to
photograph a client who came to her with an IV in her arm, and conceal it.
"We took the bag off the pole and strapped it to my thigh," says Melissa
Martineau, who had been in the hospital for severe side pain at the time of
her appointment with Jeraffi. "I did poses standing, kneeling, laying down,
sometimes totally naked. Most of them were shot from the side so you
couldn't see it, or if they were facing head on we draped a little fabric
over my arm.
"My husband is really conservative, and I didn't know if he would like the
pictures," she continues. "But we just got them back, and when he saw them
he was in awe. He wants us to buy them all."
Jeraffi says her sessions are "self-esteem boosters." "Because when you are
pregnant you don't usually feel like you are beautiful a lot of the time,"
she says. "You feel sick and you are heavy, but looking at yourself without
all the stretch marks and without all the uncomfortableness it is like
seeing yourself from the outside."
Booming business
When Linnea Lenkus set up her photography studio in South Pasadena in 1998,
she specialized in portraits of kids and babies. But ever since the Cindy
Crawford cover of W in 1999 the number of pregnant women who call her has
grown exponentially. Now about half the work she does is pregnancy
portraiture. "I think the W magazine cover just started people thinking
about it and feeling they wanted to do that for themselves," she says.
According to Matthews, the iconic magazine covers, and the increasing
popularity of maternity clothes designed to accentuate rather than conceal
large bellies, helped change the public perception of pregnancy. "I think
it was a reflection of people being more accepting of the pregnant body as
sexual and attractive," she says.
Many women say they feel especially sexy during their pregnancy.
"Oh my God, I loved being pregnant," says Diana Roth, one of Jeraffi's
clients. "I loved every minute of it. I loved the way I felt, loved the way
I looked. All my clothes were short and tight. I loved showing my belly."
"There were many times when I felt the sexiest I ever felt during my
pregnancy," says Crystal Edwards, another of Jeraffi's clients. "I went to
my high school reunion at eight months pregnant and it was a relief. I
looked great without having to lose 10 pounds."
And men have responded as well.
"My husband happens to be the man who is really attracted to me when I'm
pregnant," says Jessica Echeverry, one of Hart's clients. "When I'm
pregnant he finds me really attractive and pretty. He said, 'I want it
captured in pictures, so go find someone.' "
Lenkus also thinks that since more older women are having children, and
because of fertility pills and treatments, there are more "miracle babies."
"Pregnancy has become a really big thing, especially for women who never
thought it would happen to them," says Lenkus, who was once told she would
never have a baby, but now has a son and recently gave birth to twins.
"When I was pregnant last time I was so happy. I photographed myself every
month. I just loved to watch it."
'Let the air out'
De LA ROSA'S photo session is winding down. Jeraffi changes the CD in the
boombox to one called "The Science of Sleep" and takes a series of shots of
De La Rosa totally naked, lying on a mattress covered in soft camel-colored
velvet.
"We're almost done, you just have three left, OK?" she says, stepping down
from her ladder.
De La Rosa nods, but she looks tired. She left her house at 8 in the
morning to make it to the 11 o'clock appointment, and she still has the
three-hour return drive to look forward to.
"Do you want the Eve look?" Jeraffi asks.
De La Rosa nods again, and Jeraffi takes a plastic vine from the rack of
fabrics. She snakes the fake plant around De La Rosa's body and, after
spreading out the tired pregnant woman's hair on the mattress, climbs back
up the ladder.
"Great, Sonia," she says. "Let the air out. Beautiful."
--
Caine
Caine